[ The PC Guide ]

System Care Guide

If you are spending any significant amount of time looking around this site, you probably care about your PC and your data. You want your system to let you work--and play--efficiently, and with a minimum of hassle. Taking care of your system, and establishing a preventive maintenance routine, are critical to ensuring that you have a reliable system that performs at top efficiency year after year.

This Guide is dedicated to exploring the various ways that the system can be maintained and cared for, to ensure that it gives you years of trouble-free service. This includes topics such as data backup, hardware maintenance and cleaning, environmental concerns and the like.

I am continually amazed at how little attention preventive maintenance and system care get from most PC users. It seems that people think computers don't require any maintenance at all! No right-minded person would go for years without changing their car's oil, or replacing the air filter on their furnace, yet I routinely see:

• PCs that have never been cleaned, for years at a time.
• Systems that are not routinely checked for viruses and file system corruption.
• People who never back up their data! How can it be that so many people still have not learned from so many others' mistakes?
• Users who know a lot about how to fix problems and troubleshoot, but not much about how to prevent them in the first place.

In some cases, these situations arise because people don't know what they need to do, or how to do it. This is the reason that I wrote this Guide. I am hopeful that those of you reading this will take system care and preventive maintenance seriously. If you didn't know it was important before, or weren't sure what to do, this Guide will help. Now you have no excuse. :^)

Next: Preventive Maintenance

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