Personal Computers are now really a marvel of modern technology, storing all your personal and often professional data and accomplishing things literally impossible just a few short years ago.   While this is certainly a great advancement of older technology you are still going to have to maintain your PC to obtain it best performance.   That will allow you to keep the system functioning properly for years into the future.   Therefore the focus of this article is the focus on the maintenance of your PC software that Microsoft does not provide.

Maintaining your PC requires very little real technical knowledge – contrary to popular belief.  Most of the suggestions in this article assume NO technical knowledge whatsoever.  It is even easier than dealing with your advanced TV programming.   We will be talking about three areas of needed maintenance on your PC because they characterize the bulk of this needed care and cleanup.  There are certainly other areas of eventually required cleanup and maintenance but normal obsolescence precludes your need to address most of these so we will skip them in this article.

The first thing you need to understand is that you are dealing with an outdated perspective from Microsoft, as none of these needed functions are performed automatically on your PC as they should be.   Even though all the experts agree that any PC software maker should provide for maintenance and update functions to occur automatically, that just is not in the MS guys thinking.   Therefore you will have to schedule and run these functions yourself.

Starting with applications you may be aware that modern applications normally are delivered with onboard uninstall capabilities, but not all have them and many do not function completely or correctly.   This is more than just an unnecessary set of files taking up space; it is somewhat dangerous.  You should never uninstall an application with the delete key.  If no uninstall is provided use the uninstall feature in your Add/Remove Programs in your Control Panel.  Do not delete files that are referenced as being shared files that this application uses along with other applications.  You should remove these files individually if you can determine which files are unnecessary. These you will need to delete individually if you can determine which ones they are.  If not, do not delete any of these shared usage files.

If your application has an onboard uninstall subsystem you should always use it when possible.  If the uninstall does not function properly or aborts you should then try the Control Panel function.   You should know that the Control Panel will always attempt to launch an onboard uninstall function – if one exists – within the application.

Finally, you will need to clean up your system registry.  If you are not technically inclined you should use commercially available registry software . It will allow you to perform the necessary registry fix operations and you can achieve the necessary Registry Repair.