A little bit of computer maintenance can go a long way. How do you clean your PC or Mac to keep it running the best it can?
Laptops can be expensive and we wouldn’t blame you if you wanted to keep one around as long as possible. No one goes out of their way to spend money to replace something that should be good, and when you buy a computer, it should be good enough to stick around for a few years. But how do you make it do just that?
Taking care of the computer and being careful is one way, but so too is cleaning your computer from the inside, as well.
We’re not talking about grabbing some spray-and-wipe and going to town on the motherboard and circuits — don’t do that — but rather taking care of the software, your files, and the apps you’ve installed.
In fact, if you’re looking to keep your desktop or laptop in the best condition possible, you need to clean your computer.
Interestingly, the second Monday of February may well be “Clean Out Your Computer Day”, but you can clean your computer any day to keep it going for as long as possible. So where do you start?
Backup your computer ASAP
First things first, start with the most important part: your files. Whether it’s documents, images, audio files, code, video files, and so on, these are typically irreplaceable and something you don’t want to overlook.
Grab an external drive and backup where you are, or pay for some online storage and back up to the cloud, using storage space on the internet to ensure your files are backed up and safe.
This is an important part of any computer maintenance in general, and something you should be doing regularly.
Depending on how much storage you have, you may even be inclined to work from the cloud, such as saving files to iCloud on a Mac or OneDrive on a Windows PC, and ensuring this happens in real time, with updated files saving to the cloud for you.
Get rid of apps you’re not using
Once your backups have been made, the first way to deal with cleaning out your PC is get rid of apps you’re not using. Bin them. Trash them. But before you bin and trash, do a quick audit and work out what you don’t need anymore.
Some apps can run in the background and slow down your computer, while any and all unused apps will just simply take up space. Getting rid of them will in turn give you that back, and may free up some performance in the process.
Keep what you need and use, and uninstall the rest.
Delete temporary files and empty the bin
It’s a similar process for getting rid of temporary files, plus those files you don’t need anymore that were chucked in the bin but you just haven’t gotten around to emptying just yet.
While trash and recycled files are easy to find — check the bin — temporary files might have you scouring places you don’t know about.
Instead, you might want to use the options provided by your operating system: Windows has cleanup recommendations, while macOS can let you optimise your storage space by showing you what’s possibly unnecessary in the storage settings.
Don’t worry about defragging, either, if you have a recent computer. While hard drives often relied on the idea of a disk defragmentation app to help make them faster, you’re just wasting cycles on a solid state drive and won’t actually fix anything. Delete those unnecessary files and move on.
Alternatively, reset your computer
There’s also another option for cleaning your computer, and it may well be the most extreme. Call it the “nuclear” option, because it just about wipes everything else: a factory reset.
Resetting your computer is just about the biggest clean because it takes everything off and starts at zero. It’s a great way to return the performance of a computer back to the way it was when you bought it because that’s exactly what you’re doing.
To make this work for you, however, make sure to backup all those important files, and then (and only then) should you find the reset command.
For Windows PCs, you’ll find it in the Settings for “Reset my PC”, while Mac users will find it in recent version of macOS under System Preferences with the option to “Erase All Content and Settings”.
Each of these will tell the computer to start the reinstall process, resetting everything practically to where it was when you first got the computer, except for any operating system installs and major patches or service packs that may have been installed in between.
Once a factory reset has been complete, you’ll need to reinstall any apps and log back in to any website all over again. You’re starting from scratch, and your system will be as clean as can be.
