Topic: What does everyone else use on their PC?

[Clark Kent]

I booted up the old COmpaq today, and for no apparent reason, thought it would be a good idea to do some maintenance on it.  Well, after running the Scandisk twice in safemode I gave up since it kept having to restart the whole process because the computer was too stupid to keep from writing to the hard disk.
So I moved on to disk defragmenting, which I'm starting to remember now what a pain it is on PCs.  It takes forever!
What do the rest of you do for computer maintenance, and how often do you do it?

[Nemesis]

Run Scandisk in Safe mode.  It avoids that disk access by other programs and windows itself.

I also suggest partioning the hardrive.  I will list my layout below.

C: System - only windows and drivers go on this partition

D: Swap - only the swap file (aka virtual memory)

E: Utility - Utiity programs.

F: Applications - serious programs but NOT data

G: Games - Clear enough?

H: Data -

I found that often my Windows crashes came from problems with the swap file being corrupted.  My crash level dropped quite a bit after partitioning this way.  Also you will find that the only partitions that fragment badly are the System and games.  The other partitions do not fragment nearly as quickly and your defrags when done will be far swifter.  Also you postly only need to back up the Data drive where all your dat is concentrated rather than being scattered everywhere.

Linux inspired this change as I found that it has a dedication partion and format for a swap only partition.

[Clark Kent]

I was/am in safe mode, there was still alot of disk access going on.

[Nemesis]

I was/am in safe mode, there was still alot of disk access going on.

I don't use anything later than Windows 2000 myself so I can't be sure that isn't normal if you are using XP but for earlier versions of Windows (2000 and earlier) that should not be happening. 

I would suggest that you boot in safe mode and use the option to confirm everything and see what is running that you can stop.  You may find yourself infected.

Good Luck.

[Iceman]

It would seem so. I use XPPro,and I don't have that problem.

Also, I will run Ad-AwareSE, SpybotS&D,then any anti-virus i might have (norton, McAffee) then defrag.  I do this at LEAST every 6 months but more often than not every month. Plus i'll run Ad-aware at random times when I'm bored.

[Clark Kent]

I'm running WInME.  I'd be surprised if I was infected, since this computer has hardly maybe a handful of times) been on the internet since I did a reformat and reinstall of everything in July.

[Nemesis]

I'm running WInME.  I'd be surprised if I was infected, since this computer has hardly maybe a handful of times) been on the internet since I did a reformat and reinstall of everything in July.

I skipped the Windows Must Explode version.  Its reputation was too bad to bear.

[Clark Kent]

Well, after booting into safe mode again and checking the old ctr alt delete close program thing all I saw running was explorer.