You hardly ever think about maintaining your computer until your PC stops working as expected and starts having problems. When errors start to appear and, above all, inevitable system and program loading slowdowns, it may already be too late to think about maintenance and you have to move on to the next, more complicated, correction and repair phase. It is therefore important to know how to treat the computer, which is a bit like our car, if it is well maintained, it lasts longer and guarantees better performance. We have already seen in another article everything you need to do, more or less daily, to do computer maintenance and to fix Windows.
In this article we will instead find out what are the indispensable programs that can help us in this maintenance job, easy, free and very effective programs to keep your PC healthy and fast at all times, as and more than when it was new, trying to prevent errors and slowdowns .
1) Security Check
The first rule of maintenance of a PC is to keep it safe from malware, viruses and malicious software.
From the general guide to computer security we know that it is important to focus attention on three fundamental things: install an antivirus, update Windows and installed programs, use the computer with common sense and prudence.
In addition to this, however, a program is also indispensable to make antimalware scans every now and then, which will remove any possible malicious intruder who has run away from the antivirus (and this often happens).
Malwarebytes is the program to install and use every month or two to do a quick check, successfully detect and remove any viruses, worms, spyware and more. The free version only does full manual scans, which is more than enough for everyone.
From a security point of view, I also consider the ADWCleaner program to be indispensable, which is not an antimalware, but a tool for scanning tracer programs with advertisements and sponsors, which are almost always not desired and have been installed unintentionally.
2) Analysis of disk space
The disk is used by the PC always in a reckless way, even if the user would not want to.
Managing free disk space is very important for a computer's performance, because the more files there are, the longer the system will take to read them and the slower it will be to write new files.
Cleaning up the Downloads folder is already a good starting point, checking that we don't have duplicate photo folders is also very useful, then there are all those forgotten files, perhaps created automatically by the PC, which are scattered throughout the system, difficult to locate .
WinDirStat is therefore an indispensable program to use, because it scans the disk and allows you to see how the space of the hard disk is used by files and folders, so you can quickly locate the biggest ones to be deleted.
3) File cleaning and optimization
To clean up all files, even small ones, created by the system and programs, which can cause problems over time, you must use Ccleaner.
Ccleaner is the best known of the PC cleaning programs, free and simple, but very powerful, functional and above all safe and that does not create mess.
Ccleaner is capable of getting rid of temporary files, of emptying the browser cache, system logs and everything that is superfluous and no longer needs to be kept. In addition, Ccleaner performs this check both at the Windows system level and at the level of installed programs, really freeing up large quantities of space if it is used every 2 or 3 months. NOTE: In CCleaner there is also the function of registry cleaning, which serves no purpose and is best avoided in modern systems.
4) Complete program removal
Uninstalling programs on a Windows PC is related to the efficiency of the program itself.
Some are then completely removed, others instead leave many traces that increase the amount of obsolete files.
Maybe it's not essential, but it's still very useful to have a tool to uninstall programs such as the light and functional Geek Uninstaller, currently my favorite in this category or Revo Uninstaller, the most popular one.
Geek Uninstaller is simple, when you want to uninstall an app, it scans the system looking for all the related files that may have been left by the standard Windows uninstaller and removes them.
5) Hardware check
Knowing the exact specifications of what is inside the computer is really important, not only to install the right programs, but also to proceed with the possible replacement of parts or comparison with a newer PC.
The Speccy program gives us all the information about CPU, RAM, graphics card, memory, motherboard, Audio and all other internal parts of the computer.
In addition to Speccy, it is also very useful to install a program such as Coretemp, to control the temperature and heat on hardware components, especially in the summer.
READ ALSO: 30 Most Useful Programs for Windows
