Computers and Technology

Your laptop or desktop computer and its systems, however sophisticated and complex they may appear to be (and actually are) at face value, are also susceptible to freezes, crashes, the BSD (the feared Blue Screen of Death) or at worst a complete and total breakdown of your system.

How this affects you will depend considerably upon the nature of the failure and what you were doing at the time of the failure. For instance, if you do not store important data on your computer and it has a complete breakdown whilst you were engaged in nothing particularly important, this will not be a particularly big deal for you.

However, if you do store data on your desktop or laptop computer and you have not backed up that data, a total system breakdown could have the most disastrous of consequences, not only for your personal convenience, but also for your commercial situation.

When you relate the latter hypothesis to the fact that a personal computer, whether it is a laptop or desktop, has become almost an essential for the vast majority of people in the world, either in the personal field or in their business and financial lives, the importance of doing everything possible to avoid a computer failure becomes all the more palpable.

But how do you minimize the chances of this happening?

The first and absolute rule is to make sure that your computer is not vulnerable to attack from outside parties. There are literally millions of infections that can invade your operating system and your hard drives that can, quite literally, disable your computers. All kinds of virus, malware and spyware is out there waiting to slip inside the computer's defences, if there is even a small trace of vulnerability. Trojan horse, keyloggers and a variety of other infections can not only make your computer stop operating as it should do, or altogether, in some cases. They can also steal valuable files and dishonestly obtain sensitive stored There are numerous types of infections out there. An up to date protection system is therefore vital if you want to preserve the safety of your computer and the information stored on it. Antivirus protection and anti-malware and anti-spyware programmes are all available, often at no cost. These can ensure that your laptop or desktop continues to work and safely store your information. The best way of accessing these protection programmes is by checking out computer review sites on the internet. There you will be able to share advice from other computer enthusiasts about the best deals available to you. Whatever you do, and however you do it, make sure that you get your computer protected. It is the single most important thing to do.

Of course, it is possible that you will become infected with a virus, even with the best of protection. In that case there are tools that can be employed to eradicate the infection or you can get online advice about how to eliminate the threat manually. Modern operating systems such as Windows also provides a system restore programme, which will put your system back into the shape it was in before the computer was infected.

However, not all viruses will be eliminated by using system restore in this way, so a total clean up is usually necessary. Sadly, some viruses are so stubborn or so skilful in hiding themselves within your computer that the only way that you can be sure to get rid of them is by formatting your hard and reloading your operating system and your files and programmes from the manufacturer's CD. It is vital therefore, that you back up all your files on a regular basis so that they can be reloaded onto your computer if you do indeed need to carry out a format. If you are storing important information it probably makes sense to back this information up - meaning copying it onto some portable storage medium such as a CD or a USB drive or an external hard drive - at least once every week. That way your files will be protected and capable of being restored to your computer if you are unlucky enough to have to carry out a complete re-writing of your hard drive. The vast majority of computers have a large amount of random access memory (commonly referred to as RAM) The amount of RAM will affect how quickly your processes run. If you have an older desktop or laptop computer and it is running more slowly than you would like you may consider upgrading the amount of RAM. Memory cards can be purchased easily on the internet and you might be pleasantly surprised at the increased efficiency of your computer after carrying out an upgrade.

The same can also be said about reducing the amount of data held on your hard disk. The fuller this hard disk is the slower your computer is likely to run. There are two basic ways to free up space on your hard drive. The first of these is simply to uninstall any unnecessary or unused programmes that you have stored there. This can free up lots of hard disk space, particularly if you are uninstalling large programmes. The second way is to defragment your hard drive. This process collects the files on your computer that have become fragmented and re-organises then tidily, thus saving space and also causing the programmes to run more efficiently. If you find that you still have simply too much stored on your computer you might try to move photographs and other heavy space using files, such as media files onto an external hard drive. This can also free up lots of space.

The final option is to buy a new hard drive and install this in place of your old one. This is an option, which, unlike the upgrading of your RAM, is likely to require the help of a computer engineer. You might also want to look at the number of programmes that automatically start up when you turn on your computer. When you download or add certain programmes they write themselves to start up every time your computer switches on. This can cause a long wait for all of these programmes to load.

The more of these you remove at start up the quicker your computer will be in loading.

Finally, you might with to consider cleaning up your registry entries so that unnecessary entries are removed. It is advisable to be very careful when doing this and it is probably best not to try it at all unless you know what you are doing because you may disable your computer altogether. However, if you do know what you are doing, tidying up the registry can have a very positive impact on the performance of your computer.

Conclusion

In summary, there are several ways that you can enhance the performance of your computer. There are also ways of cleaning up your computer if it becomes affected by an infection. However the best advice that anyone could give is that it better to be safe than sorry. So protect your computer from these threats at all times.