PC Maintenance Includes Hard Drive Reformatting

I regularly perform maintenance on my PC to keep it running as fast as possible. I defrag my hard drive on a monthly basis. I have one antispyware program that I use daily to monitor for infections 24/7 in real time as well as a daily disc scan, and another antispyware program that I use on a weekly basis to scan my system for infections my other antispyware may have missed. I also wipe, or reformat, my hard drive about once a year to keep my PC running like new.

Wiping a hard drive is fairly simple, but requires some preparation. Wiping the hard drive is the process of completely removing everything off of it and starting fresh. Obviously there are things on the hard drive that are valuable and need to be accessible for future use. Making a backup of files, programs and plug-ins is important to ensure I don’t delete something I can’t get back!

The things I back up include:

• Fonts
  
• My Music (My iTunes library and other MP3’s)
  
• My Photos
  
• My Documents
  
• My Downloads (Programs that were downloaded without a physical disc)
  
• Dreamweaver Site Definitions
  
• Photoshop Plug-ins
  
• Bookmarks and Favorite Links
  
• Financial Information (Microsoft Money)
  
• Email (Outlook)
  

I have 2 hard drives; one is my active hard drive or my C drive. The other is used only for archive and backup purposes. I use an internal hard drive as by backup because external hard drives tend to be slower.

After all the important data is backed up it is important to make sure I have physical copies of my software, most importantly my operating system, currently Windows XP. When the hard drive is wiped, the operating system is removed as well as all other programs and software.

Once everything is backed up, reformatting the hard drive is pretty simple. The process varies depending on what OS you are using. I use Windows XP and reformatting my hard drive is very simple. All I have to do is insert the Windows XP CD, reboot my PC and it will walk me through the steps from there. When it asks if I want to format the drive and gives me the warning about my losing data, I click YES… and that’s pretty much it!

You can research on the Microsoft website how to reformat your hard drive depending on your OS here:
http://www.microsoft.com/

Reformatting your hard drive at least once a year will make a huge difference in the performance of your machine. I recommend getting in the habit of regularly backing up your important files so when you do your yearly hard drive reformatting, the backup process will not be a huge undertaking in itself.