How to Keep a PC Running Smoothly

Video Transcript

"Hi. I'm Chris Bryce from superservice.com. I'd like to talk to you about how to keep a PC running smoothly. When you're trying to keep your computer running smoothly, one of the main things to keep in mind is that the software programs out there, for the most part, that claim to do that for you or to speed things up, actually, can cause more harm than good. So my personal recommendation is don't add any software to your computer that claims to make it faster or to make it better. All those software programs end up doing is adding another step for your computer to go through. And, again, can cause more harm that good. The next thing to keep in mind is in adding programs that might not be beneficial to you and making sure that when you upgrade programs, you uninstall the previous versions. If you have, for instance, video player installations that are media players that are playing files on your computer and you have several different versions of them from version two to version three and you have version six on there, you want to make sure and uninstall those previous versions if you're not using them. If there's a genuine need, such as some people who may have Office 2007, and they may keep a copy of Office 2000 on their computer as well, to make sure they're compatible with friends and colleagues, that's fine. But if you generally don't need the software anymore, then I would say uninstall it and just install the newer versions. Those are two of the main things to keep your computer running smoothly. The next thing is try to keep away from downloading software and keeping it on your hard drive. You're going to want to make sure that your software that you're downloading, if you don't need it any more, then you go ahead and get rid of it. But also, in your Internet browsing cache, history, your temporary Internet files, keep those all down to a minimum because that does actually affect the way the system itself runs. The other thing to keep in mind is that when you're installing your software for the first time, you're going to want to make sure and put it in a good location. If you use the default location of program files, that's terrific because all the programs get stored in the same directory and it's easy for your computer to access. If you have software programs you're installing in different directories all over the computer in different hard drives and that to, then you're going to have problems seeking the information and trying to find it. On that same note, with keeping information on different parts of the hard drive, a lot of people tend to want to defragment their hard drives. My personal recommendation is not to do that. It's like a scratch that you have to itch. It's like an itch that you have to scratch. The more you scratch it, the more you feel that you have to. The same thing with defragmenting; the more you defragment, the more the computer feels like you have to defragment and that actually can slow your computer down. I personally have never defragmented any of my computers and they're running flawlessly and very quickly because I don't have any additional software and I don't take any additional steps that will slow it down. Those are the main things to consider to keep your PC running smoothly."