The 5 Best Tricks to Keep your Operating System Healthy

A little preventative maintenance can go a long way toward keeping a machine optimized and trouble-free. Here are some basic but vital steps to follow.

Maintain a healthy operating system in a hostile environment

There are so many ways to ensure a healthy system that your job might primarily consist of keeping the machines in good repair. So let's narrow down the methods to keep machines running smoothly and consider some of the most important ways to maintain a healthy system and avoid the dreaded hacking. Perhaps one idea could be to disconnect it from the network and never allow it to be online, but if we think logically, that is not a valid or possible option for most users, especially those whose business depends on a computer that must be connected to the network. 

Tips to maintain a healthy operating system

Clean temporary Internet files

People are always surprised at how much their browser saves. Between cookies, images, and other cached files, a web browser can really clog up a user's C drive. Although the drives are cheap and huge, I have come across cases where there were over 20 gigs of internet files cached (cross-browser). Obviously, this can cause problems when space becomes an issue and can cause significant web browser slowdowns. Keeping these cached files clean will help your machine run smoothly and allow for a better web browsing experience. The browser cache can be cleared from the user's browser. In fact, some browsers can be configured to automatically clear the cache on exit. If users tend to hoard their cache, set your browser to automatically clear the cache when they exit.

Clean the registry

The registry is a crucial component and can become corrupted, broken, or generally broken very easily. Removal programs, virus infections, rootkits, Trojans, improper computer shutdown… there are so many possible ways to corrupt a registry. But fortunately there are many tools available to clean the operating system registry because doing the job manually would be almost impossible. Some tools allow for quick and easy cleaning of your operating system's registry and there are many other tools that can handle this same task, so the choice will probably depend on your needs and tastes.

Keep antivirus and antimalware definitions up to date

It is always surprising when you are working with your PC and discover that the options offered to protect your operating system are outdated or outdated. This is just asking for trouble, as new viruses appear almost daily. If your virus definitions are not set to update automatically every night, change them to do so. If this is not an option, you should at least ensure that users are aware of the need to manually update those definitions every night. If this requires the need to set reminders for users, so be it. But no matter how it is done, you must be sure that it is being done. Aside from keeping a computer off the network, no single task can help ensure the health of a PC better than keeping antivirus and antimalware programs up to date.

Defrag drives

This point is important especially for Windows users. You'd think Microsoft would have solved the fragmentation problem somewhere in the build process Vista and Windows 7. But it didn't and instead, it set up Windows 7 with an automatically scheduled defragmentation. That's all well and good, but there are some people still using Windows XP who don't benefit from Microsoft hiding its inability to solve a problem that has plagued the platform for a long time. If you are one of them and you are still using Windows XP, you should make sure that those machines are set to automatic defragmentation at least once a week.

Run a disk check

This one is not really for new users, but for administrators. From time to time (maybe once a month), it's good to run it.

It's really not that difficult to maintain a computer with a healthy operating system, but it does take a little time and, in some cases, a little patience. Make sure you follow these five tips and those computers will live a long, healthy and productive life without any damage that you have to worry about and take time to repair.