Maintenance Tips: Essential Trouble-Saving Tips Are Just a Link Away

Eleven of the year's best tips drawn from the past 12 issues of PC World.

Former PC World Senior Editor Michael S. Lasky is now a freelance writer and PC consultant in San Francisco.

Each year PC World publishes hundreds of tips to help you maintain, secure, troubleshoot, and improve the performance of your hardware and software. Here are quick links to 11 top tips for the upkeep and protection of your system, peripherals, and data. Clip this page and keep it near your computer as an index to our essential PC maintenance tips.

Lean and Mean Windows

Your first line of defense is a fully patched PC. To update Windows automatically in XP, right-click My Computer, click Properties, Automatic Updates, choose Automatic (recommended), set a time for the updates (or accept the default), and click OK. For more, read last May's Internet Tips column by Scott Spanbauer, "It's Time to Update Your Internet Security Arsenal."

To recover space on your hard drive, delete the massive uninstall folders that Windows creates for major updates (see Figure 1

Figure 1: Save space on your hard drive by deleting unneeded uninstall folders from past Windows updates.

). Read Lincoln Spector's March Answer Line on deleting unneeded uninstall folders.

Some aging PCs need a complete Windows restore. To get your system working the way it did out of the box, read Lincoln's tips from his March "Windows Rejuvenated!" feature.

Once you have Windows back in shape, set the OS to clean up after (and protect) itself. Lincoln tells you how in "Let Windows Handle PC Maintenance for You," from last July's Answer Line.

Hardware Cure-Alls

For quick help with PC problems, Windows crashes, network snafus, uncooperative printers, and lots of other common computing conundrums, see Kirk Steers's "Five-Minute Fixes" from last January.

To nip PC troubles in the bud, read Kirk's August Hardware Tips column, "Ten Quick Tips to Keep PC Trouble at Arm's Length."

Kirk tells how to calculate the wattage needs of your PC's components--and ensure that your power supply can handle the load--in his April column, "Do the Math to Get Your PC All the Power It Needs."

If your system is just slightly quieter than a fully loaded 747 at takeoff, check out Lincoln Spector's tips for turning the volume down on all your PC's components in "Quiet, Please! Cut Your PC's Clatter the Cool Way," his October Answer Line column.

Preventive Security

We've said it before, and we'll say it again: Think before you click! It's getting tougher to tell the legitimate e-mail links from the phishing hooks, as Scott Spanbauer discovered while researching last March's Internet Tips column, "Paranoia: The Best Defense Against E-Mail Attacks"; see Figure 2

Figure 2: Look twice to tell the legitimate e-mail link from the bogus phishing attempt.

).

Andrew Brandt's July Security Tips column, "Identify Malware Hiding in Windows' System Folders," described new pests lurking in Windows, and the free Process Explorer utility for unmasking these sneaks.

Finally, for safer Web browsing with Internet Explorer, check out Steve Bass's "Four Tips to Make IE More Secure," his September Hassle-Free PC column.