Workstation Maintenance

Rarely have I lost my work due to computer disaster. It has happened, but not too often, because I maintain a fairly strict regimen of computer health. Since computers are the tools I depend on, I perform the following maintenance on Windows PCs and Macs...

Windows (XP/Vista/7):
Download CCleaner, Defraggler, and Easy Cleaner. I run Defraggler about once a week to defragment my hard disk drives, but you can get away with running it once a month or even once a season. Just don't ignore your computer's hard disk drive. I run a combination of the registry cleaners from CCleaner and Easy Cleaner 2 to maintain a healthy registry about twice a month. You could depend on Microsoft's tools in the System Tools folder, but I've grown to ignore Microsoft's tools as lowest-common-denominator and wouldn't mind if someone created a script to uninstall most of the tools from their operating system altogether.

Also, I have successfully run Fred Langa's XP's No-Reformat, Nondestructive Total Rebuild Option for the Registry and found that it really does slim-down the Windows Registry and makes one's computer run faster without having to re-install software like Microsoft Office. I would not run this unless you've backed up your whole hard disk drive and are comfortable with re-installing the backup image if something goes wrong.

Mac OS X:
I was unable to easily locate an open-source hard disk drive defragmenter for the Mac, but a Google search did bring up Coriolis System's iDefrag. There is a free version that shows you how fragmented your hard drive is. If you don't want to defragment your hard drive, or feel that the drive isn't fragmented enough to fork over $30, then you don't have to do another thing. If you're like me, and get kind of anal about your hard disk, then $30 is chump-change compared to an inefficient drive.

I also back up my whole hard disk drive using the partimage program off of a Knoppix or Ubuntu live CD, at least for Windows machines (TimeMachine works just fine for my Mac needs), but that will have to be covered in another blog post.