New Year's Resolution No. 2: The PC Tune-Up

The holiday refrain "I know it's been said many times, many way" pretty well sums up my feelings about columns having to do with tuning up your PC. But now that we're all connected at high speeds, moving photos, video, music, and files off and onto our computers, it's more important than ever to make sure that the PC tune-up is not an empty promise.

There are basically three ways to get a PC tune-up (four if you count bringing it into the shop and having someone do it for you).

1. Manually, using the tools that ship with your computer.
2. Using specially purchased software like Diskeeper or Norton 360.
3. Abdicating and getting it done remotely.

In New Year's Resolution No. 1, I looked at housecleaning—tossing or archiving your old files and programs as part of your PC fitness regime. Today, it's all about the tune-up, and I'll use Windows XP as the example.

Windows has a number of tune-up tools. You can:

Scan for disk errors: If it's going to go wrong, the hard disk is the likely target. To check your disk for physical errors, open My Computer and select the drive you want to examine. Then, right-click on the drive name, click on the Tools tab, and then select Error-Checking. Click Check Now. Under Check Disk options, select Scan and attempt recovery of bad sectors. (You can't use your drive while it's being scanned, and the more stuff you have on the disk the longer it takes.)

Clean up temporary files: Temporary files are created by your programs to store information while programs are actively running. The computer isn't smart enough to know the difference between the temporary and permanent things on your drive. Having lots of temp files can really slow you down. In Windows XP, go to Windows Explorer, right-click on the drive you want to clean, and then select Disk Cleanup> (it's on the General tab next to the pie chart depicting your disk usage). Windows will then calculate how much space you can free up and on your command initiate a cleanup. A good clean-up program will clean up everything from Windows and Internet temporary files to programs you have used to do installation or setup. (Windows offers some confusing choices about which files to clean that may send you looking for a more automated solution.)

Defrag: In Windows XP, select Accessories, then System Tools, and then Disk Defragmenter. Click on Analyze. When Disk Defragmenter finishes analyzing the volume, it displays its analysis and asks you whether you want to run the defragger software.

To understand what defragging does, think about your hard drive and the way it stores data. Every time you store something like a document it gets saved, but not always in contiguous segments on your drive. I imagine my drive looks a bit like my clothes closet with a lot of mismatched, unpaired, and strewn things. A defragger puts the pieces back together again, speeding up your machine's performance and freeing up some space. (The Mac and Vista allow you to set up an automatic defrag.)

If you do the above, plus perform backups routinely, you should be doing pretty well. If these steps seem a bit intimidating, you can automate the process by using programs like Norton 360 that tell you when it's time to do these things and you just say "do it." This program is one of the most user friendly I've ever used. Diskeeper is a popular and powerful automatic defragmenter; TuneUp Utilities is another well-maintained set of utilities. Those of you who are a bit more techie and a bit more frugal can download free or low cost tune-up help. This PC World article names the best.

Services like PC Pitstop, support.com, and iYogi (based in India), all offer the same types of cleanup and optimization as they remotely take charge of your PC, and handle everything through the Internet.