Long Live Windows

Windows has a higher death rate than uncoordinated and clumsy arsonist with a tank of petrol and too many matches, right?

Maybe so, I health diet for Windows is usually seen as:

* Defrag
* Scan Disk
* Back Up
* Disk Cleanup

This may be shaped from the fact that under the properties on each hard drive these are the main utilities to run for your hard drive and Windows and is usually advertised as being able to boost performance and speed. I am not denying the advantages of running each.

Some believe that excessive running of these utilities will wear out the disk, what doesn't get worn by use? some think that it may reduce the life of their hardware by years. My view is that most well known brand name hardware manufacturers design their products to last longer than than their obsolete period (i.e. should last long enough to see the day when they are out-dated technology) of course excessive use and the way you use it can make the statement above not so true to you. So i run defrag (only) when i suffer from high loading times and disk access times.

The recommended amount is once a month.

Some people believe that the messy state of the hard rive can wear them out more than the process of reorganising the data on the disk and some software companies even make defrag software that are designed to run constantly to give you a defraged hard drive 24/7

Running all these utilities can take a long time especially scan disk and defrag and especially if you have a large hard drive or have use a large portion of your hard drive.

To save time you can run:

* Defrag -> Auslogic, is faster than Win XP defrag and free too

* Scan Disk -> Only when you suspect that hard disk has an error, data curruption, constant crashes, never ending loading times.

* Back Up -> Use a back up software that compares and synchronises your data to save time because it only has to write data that has been changed. {}

* Disk Cleanup -> Run only once a month or even two months if you don't save much space on each run.

{} For personal use and general purposes of backup which don't involve life changing data, I would recommend using compare and sync backup software as it is much quicker and provides a good enough data backup if done right. If your corporate (which i highly doubt, as you should have your own IT support department to take care of backup) then you may want to use Full and partial back ups for safer measures but if the amount of data that is changes is low then compare and sync will do fine. E.g. if you have 6 Gb of data changed and or created then of course you should use more professional backup measure but if you only need to back up 8MB of changed data and maybe 30Mb of new mp3 song and 40Mb of new digital photos then why bother with difficult back up? just compare for changes, make changes and add the new files to backup disk easy. your done!

My diet is a bit different as i go further than the hard disk utilities:

* Defrag
* Backup
* Reg defrag
* Swap defrag
* Reg repair
* AV and spyware scan
* Security software updates
* Physical clean and layout adjustments

My method can corrupt data or Windows if done incorrectly so i won't entice anyone to try it by explaining how and what to do.