Keeping Your System in Tip-Top Shape

Ever thought about what you can do to keep your computer running well? I'm sure we all have, and pretty often. There are a few things you can do regularly to make sure that the computer you run ReminderPro on is as healthy as can be. Here are my ideas:

Restart the computer often. While a computer is running programs, information gets stuffed away in memory. This is information that the computer needs temporarily to do its thing, and the space taken by this stuff is usually made available after the job is done. Nonetheless, programs like ReminderPro can stuff away quite a bit of this information. To clear this stuff out, we recommend that you restart the computer weekly, at least.

Defragment the hard drive. I won't go into all the technical stuff required to fully explain this, but let me just say that defragmenting your computer's hard drive can make a big difference in how the computer runs. It could be faster and more reliable if you defragment regularly, perhaps monthly. Certainly, it'll help avoid problems with ReminderPro. That said, you would defragment your hard drive by going to Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools and clicking on Disk Defragmentor.

Clear out temporary files. Personally, I've found that some frustrating things can happen if there is a "bad" temporary file on your computer. This can happen if a program you're working in locks up, or if a power surge restarts your computer for you. So if you have a situation when using your computer, you might wish to restart and then delete temporary files, just to try to keep things running smoothly. (Frankly, its a good practice to do this monthly, anyway.) Now, there are a few ways to delete temporary files, but the easiest is to go to Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools and click Disk Cleanup. You would run it against your C: drive(it'll prompt you). After it has scanned your computer, it will pop up a list of things you can "cleanup". The only one that needs to be checked off is Temporary Files. That said, it is a good idea to empty the Recycle Bin occasionally, and maybe do other things from time to time - especially if you need more room on your hard drive. But that is optional for our purposes here, so I'll leave that up to you.

Are there other things you do to keep your computer running? Please share them below.

Kaylee Mulholland