General Windows Maintenance Tips (Part 3)

This is part 3 of the 'General Windows Maintenance Tips' article.

• Hard Drive Maintenance: To prevent data loss on your hard drive, you need to check it to make sure that there is no damage to the file system, and you don't have bad sectors on it. Sometimes the file system which stores and retrieves the files from the hard disk can get damaged from system failure, power losses, or some other type of failure. Windows includes some basic utilities to scan the file system and repair the damage it finds. Note: More sophisticated disk utilities are available from 3rd party software developers, such as: Norton SystemWorks, or System Mechanic Professional.
• Open My Computer under the Start menu
• Right-click on the C: drive icon, select Properties.
• Select the Tools tab
  
• Press the 'Check Now...' button, in the 'Error-checking' section.
  
• Then check the 'Automatically fix file system errors' and/or 'Scan for and attempt to recovery of bad sectors' checkboxes.
• Defragmenting Your Hard Drive: To help increase your system's performance, you can defragment the files on your computer's hard drive. The defragment process organizes the files on the hard drive so that they can be quickly read into the computer's memory. Its a good idea to delete temporary files, and empty the trash can before running this utility. Note: There is some debate to how much of a performance increase you will get by defragmenting your computer's hard drive. All I am going to say is that you need to make your own determination.
  
• Open My Computer under the Start menu
• Right-click on the C: drive icon, select Properties.
• Select the Tools tab
  
• Press the 'Defragment Now...' button, in the Defragmentation section.
  
• Press the Analyze button to see how much disk fragmentation your hard drive has, press the Defragment button to defragment the drive.