Because while you may not notice the price of not maintaining your kitchen appliances until they actually break down, you will generally pay the price everytime you try to use your neglected computer. It will run slower and slower and take more time to get started, shut down, and process stuff. And all you’ll know is that the little bugger ‘just takes so long’ to do stuff that you want done now.

You see, the more you use your computer the more you are asking it to take whatever remaining space it has on the hard drive, its version of a brain, and store that stuff for potential later use. But unlike the grey matter in your head the computer is not just using less than 10% of it’s useable space. It will make use of all available space as it needs to. So, the more you use it, the longer you use it, the more stuff you have it do – the more e-clogged up and e-full it becomes.

Eventually, as the computer fills up its hard drive, it just begins to stuff files and things wherever it can fit them. It doesn’t care where they go. As long as it can find a space – it starts stuffing e-files in. And the result is your computer just responds slower and slower and s l o w e r.

But, unfortunately with this filing mess you can’t yell at your computer “Go clean up your room, NOW!” Well, I guess you could. You might even want to yell at it to vent a bit. But neither will work.

You see, you have to do a couple of things first. You have to set up the cleaning schedule. And you have to at the very least do manual and regular hard drive defragmentations. And how do you do these things? Easy.

Every few weeks click on Start>Programs>Accessories>System Tools and then click on both Disk Cleanup and then Disk Defragmentor. On the pop-up screens click where you need to and follow the simple instructions and then let your computer do what it needs to do – uninterrupted. In an hour or less you’ll be done.

Oh, and after you do this don’t be like I was when I got my first computer. I waited 673 days between defrag sessions. The tech support guy I called to find out why my computer was running so slowly said I ‘set a new record for not doing what I should have been doing’. That’s the type of record you don’t need to try to break.

Written by Andre Best
President, Ultimate Results, Inc.
http://www.andrebest.com - Learn About Life From Another Perspective

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