There's Never Enough Time...

Busy, busy, busy. Never enough time to do everything you want to do. Family, friends, your job -- a person never catches up and often it feels like one is getting further and further behind. Life never gives us enough time for everything.

In our hectic everyday lives, who has time to do the little things that should be done but that don’t seem high on the priority list? Almost no one does those things, even if they know they should. Too many other things they’d rather do or have to do. One of those rarely-done little things is computer maintenance. People always have things they'd rather do than backing up computer files or deleting unneeded files.

Computers are becoming an important or even necessary part of many people’s lives. Between email, finances and computer files that make life more fun, such as digital music and digital photos, people have a lot of information on computers that is very valuable to them. And that's before you even think about important computer files for work or school. Most of that information is on the computer’s hard drive.

Fortunately, large hard drives are inexpensive and can hold huge amounts of information. Unfortunately, all that information can be lost in an instant when the hard drive fails or the files on the hard drive are corrupted or deleted. Fortunately, there are relatively easy and inexpensive ways to back up all those files people have on their large hard drives. Unfortunately, most people either never find time to back up their computer files or don’t know how to back up them up. Fortunately, myDigitechnician can help people set up and follow a regular backup routine for their computer files. Unfortunately, many people who might want to have myDigitechnician help them back up their files don’t know about myDigitechnician.

In addition to backing up files, there are other computer maintenance tasks which many people never find time to do or don’t know how to do. Some of these tasks are:

• Deleting temporary and other unneeded files. These files can slow down your computer and can cause it to run poorly. You may even have some spyware, adware or viruses in your temporary files.
• Verifying anti-malware programs are current and operating correctly. Because they are not fun and sometimes a bit complicated, many people install anti-virus, anti-spyware and other anti-malware programs and then rarely check to make sure they are doing everything they should. These anti-malware programs will only protect your computer if they are up-to-date and working correctly.
• Defragmenting the hard drive. When a computer is used, it periodically saves files to the hard drives. Sometimes when it saves files, those files get stored in two or more pieces in different places on the hard drive. Later, when the computer wants to save a new version of the file or open the file back up, it has to look in several place to get the whole file. Also, when it is looking for other information on the hard drive, it has to go through all the pieces of files that are stored in different places. Over time, these broken-up files cause the computer to operate more slowly. This is why you should defragment your computer every so often. Defragmenting will put those pieces of files back together and make the computer run more quickly. Depending on how they use the computer, most people should defragment their hard drive every one to three months.

By following a regular computer maintenance program, computer users will avoid heartache and potential loss of information that is difficult or even impossible to replace. They will also have a computer that is faster, more fun and less annoying to use. In an upcoming post, computer hardware maintenance will be discussed.

In the meantime, call myDigitechnician at 920-858-1377 for an in-home computer service appointment to get your files backed up and other maintenance done on your computer!