Well today is the first day of Spring 2011, and not only is it time to open the windows and door and get fresh air into your house, it’s also time to do the same for your computer. I mean after all we clean our cars and all the stuff packed into our garage and closets over winter out, so why not your computer virtually and physically?! Facing this issue with hesitation like most computer users is common, but once your done (plan for at least a few hours to do it right) you will feel much better about your computer and it’s health.

So what’s on the checklist of things to do? Well this varies from computer to computer and user to user depending on through out the year how well you do maintenance on your system. My system for instance is a water cooled PC which will require a bit more time than what a non-water cooled PC will. Plus I make sure my computer stays in tuned up running shape in every way possible that doesn’t take a lot of time and logistics throughout the year.

This is a really good time to crack the ‘ole case open and have a look inside, as well as take a once over to see what’s up and possible cure something that may have been ailing your computer temperature wise, or hardware wise. So the list….sorry I get side tracked easily when thinking about working on computers, it’s something I absolutely love to do, as some of you know!

THE list:

• Dust around and over your monitor(s) and make sure no dust is caked inside or around the vents. Make sure you do the same with keyboard and tower.
• While you are looking at the monitor(s) Now would be a good time to mix up a 60/40 solution of rubbing alcohol and water (preferably from a filter or distilled so you have no minerals) and clean the gunk off your monitor. You know from all those late nights of popping your beverage of choice and yelling at people inside of games.
• As far as the keyboard goes, I think everyone eats around their keyboards, mine gets all kinds of stuff in it, and with a little pressure your keys will come out. So why not take the keyboard apart and clean it real good with some cleaner of your choice, or at least blow it out with air.
• Move to the case, take those side and front panels off, yeah yuck. See all that dust it’s time to either get a vacuum cleaner or take it outside with some compressed air and get all that crap off of there. Make sure you don’t blow the air on your fans it will kill the bearings in them. Take them out first for a good cleaning!
• Take out the case fans, yes all the way out, what you thought I was kidding? Find your Q-Tips and some alcohol. The best method I’ve figured out for removing all the dust is clean around the outside and leave the blades themselves for last. Once you get to those soak them with alcohol and set it on each blade with pressure. Then spin it with pressure applied. You will notice it will pick up quite a lot of the dust.
• Don’t forget the power supply, depending on how bad your dust problem is you may need to remove it to get it cleaned out all the way. DON’T take off the top of it, the capacitors inside the case of the PSU can discharge enough voltage to hurt or even kill you! If you want to take the top off it to really clean it, or do that sleeving job you had planned make sure you discharge them first!

Put everything back together, remember before you put your case back on the desk nows a good time to clean up the desk and clean off anything that’s left, you know sticky spots of spilled drinks or other unmentionables…..Now time to look into the software maintenance! You want it to run great with it feeling great right?! You will need a few freeware programs.

• CCleaner
• MalwareBytes

So lets boot up and start cleaning.

• Open CCleaner and make sure it’s updated. You want to run a full cleanup under the “Cleaner” Icon.
• Now move down to “Registry” icon and scan and fix any issues it finds. You can save a backup in case you are paranoid. I’ve never had CCleaner every mess a machine up.
• Click on the “Tools” icon. First uninstall any applications you haven’t used in awhile, especially stuff that hasn’t been used in 6+ months.
• Goto the startup tab, remove any start up items you don’t want or need.
• Under System restore I normally don’t have anything as I turn the service off since it’s useless to me with full image backups I do. However if you do have a lot there and your machine has been running great I would clear them out. Free up some space!

You can ignore the rest of the options that CCleaner has, if you didn’t notice it probably cleaned A LOT of stuff out of Internet Explorer, Fire Fox, or Chromes temp files, especially if you use Chrome because it cache’s every imagine, video, and page you come across to help speed up the experience. You will have to re-enter your logins on whatever sites you visit however you may notice a good speed increase if you’ve never messed with cleaning it out! So now on to some better cleaning.

Under Vista and 7 the folder you will work with is “C:\Users” where in XP(Upgrade for christ’s sake) it’s under “C:\Documents and Settings”.

• GoTo your users folder noted above.
• Click Tools -> Folder Options -> View Tab (In vista/7 you have to hit the ‘alt’ key to see this)
• Check Mark “Show Hidden Files and Folders”
• Go into your user folder, normally your name.
• AppData -> Local -> Temp
• Delete anything in there, could be very little, could be a lot. This is all temp files for installers, plugins, downloads, whatever. Nothing in here is important. There will be a few files that will not delete they are apart of windows performance counters and will clear our on a reboot anyways and regenerated.
• Rehide the files if you want you’re done here!

Now lets take a look at any malware you may have. You should have already downloaded and installed MalwareBytes. So lets open it up! This will look for rootkits and malware that may have been installed, along with tracking cookies that reside on your computer. It shouldn’t find any cookies because CCleaner has already wiped em out!

• Obviously it should have updated on install, however if you have a previous install now is a good time to click on the “Update” tab and make sure you have the latest revision of definitions and program.
• On the “Scanner” tab, the one it opens to, make sure you have “Perform Full Scan” selected and hit scan.
• Depending on the amount of stuff you have and the speed of your computer and drives this could take anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours. So grab a drink and go outside for awhile. It should be decent enough weather.
• Once it finds whatever it finds, hopefully nothing, make sure each is check marked and select clean. It will remove anything it finds and probably ask if you want to restart the computer. If it needs to reboot now and return here!
• You’re done now with MalwareBytes, we are getting closer to finished!

So now we have taken care of the physical condition of our computer, hopefully while you were inside the case you took a few minutes to check the condition of your wiring and heatsinks and made sure they were ok (you did do that didn’t you?), we’ve taken a look at cleaning up the hard drive, and getting rid of any malware and some virus’s. Now would be a great time to run a full virus scan with your scanner of choice. I prefer Eset’s NOD32 and if you follow my referral link we both get something out if it! I’ll get a free month of service for each activation and you’ll get 25% off! It’s a great Anti-virus and what I put on everyone’s machines I work on when they want the best payware anti-virus you can buy. Doesn’t slow your machine down at all and doesn’t have all that firewall, link filter BS like McAfee, Norton, or PC-Cillin. So what if you don’t have an Anti-Virus solution an need a great free one?! Well that’s simple, you want one you can scan with and not install? I like ClamWin AV Portable. Works great picks up just about everything and nice to use if you use public computers to make sure files aren’t infected because you can run it from a thumb drive. However I wouldn’t suggest it on your everyday computer because it doesn’t give you active protection.  For that I prefer, believe it or not, Microsoft Security Essentials. Runs great doesn’t drag down the computer and ranks highly on third party testing sites. So that’s that, if you had to read that and do anything you have been at risk severly, so solve it NOW!

The last major thing I would suggest for great cleaning is the last and most important. Especially for you gamers out there. On XP get a copy of Disk Trix Ultimate Defrag for you Vista/7 user lookup O&O defrag. O&O is excellent and works on either system so I would suggest it for both but is a bit more costly, if you buy it. Run a full name and number defrag, on your drives. It will take a LONG TIME especially if you have never ran it. But I promise you, you will see a pretty nice increase in the speed of your machine. If you don’t do anything this year to clean up your computer, do this.

And as always if you have any questions, put it in the comments I’ll help you where I can. So happy spring!…? Bring on summer!