Male Speaker: We depend on computers for everything nowadays. They keep a story of our lives, our pictures, our videos, our contacts, and our schedules. Now just imagine if all that went away, imagine if you try to turn on your computer and you get nothing, everything is gone. In this video, I'm going to show you some steps on how to reduce that risk.
Step one prepare for the worst
The first step to take into account is to prepare for the worst, which means backing up your data. And here are some pros and cons of how to do that. The first option is the CD's or DVD's, these are cheap, they have decent read/write speeds and they can store up to 50 gigabytes blu-rays. Now the cons is that they are easy to damage and they also have poor burn accuracy, the faster you burn them. The next option is through flash drives, these are durable and portable they have fast read/write times, but the cons is that they have small storage size and that the larger storage size you want, the more expensive they are going to be. Next option is through hard drives, these are the most popular, they have large storage sizes fast read/write times and they also have RAID options available.
But the cons are that they are very fragile and they can wear down pretty easily over time. The last option is like a mix between hard drives and flash drives, they are solid state drives, they have fast read/write times, and it's durable and not likely to wear down overtime. And yet, they are expensive and they don't have large storage sizes available yet.
Step two defragment your hard drive
Defragment your hard drive means you are taking fragments of data and put them in one easy to access place on your hard drive. How does this help your hard drive's performance? I'll show you. This represented defragment hard drive have all the data's in one space, it's easy to retrieve. Now on a fragmented hard drive, the data spread out, so the hard drive has to do a lot to more work to retrieve all of it. To run a defragmentation on your hard drive, just go to start, go to accessories, and then go to system tools and there should be a disk defragmenter option. It looks different and Visita and XP, but both of them allow you to set the defragmenter on a schedule or go ahead and defragment your hard disk if it needs it.
Step three monitor your hard drive's health
The third step to take into account is monitoring your hard drive's health. The best way to do this is with software and there are some free options available out there. So just do Goggle search of hddhealth and it should bring up a result that goes to panterasoft.com. And at the bottom of their page, you should see a link to their free hddhealth application. Then you can just download it and install and it should automatically run. What it's going to do is it's going to tell you the approximate health and temperature of your hard drive, so you can kind of keep an eye on what's going on with it. And as you can see mine is a little bit high in the temperature 49 degree Celsius. And it also gives you information about the partition space on your hard drive and your system itself. And what you can do with this information is go to file and options and have it alert you, if this information gets too critical and in that way, you can keep an eye on the status of your hard drive and your partition space and if it starts getting out of plan.
Now another Co application that you can either run instead of this or along with is that hddscan.com. And it's an other free application that you can download, so just download and save it to your computer and it'll save as zip file and what you want to do is just extract everything that's in that zip file and you'll find and hddscan.exe application. Just double click on that to run it and this is what the program is going to look like and what you can do is click on the smart button and its going to give you a break down that you can either save to file or print and it gives you that all the in formation on your hard drive and as you can see its got little exclamation points about the temperature. But you can save this and kind of benchmark your hard drive status.
Step four keep your system running cool
The best way to make sure that your computer is running cool is by making sure that its stays clean. Now, this means getting rid of any obstructions that maybe in the front or getting rid of any dust particles that maybe working around. There is a couple of different ways to do this; most people seem to prefer using a can of compressed air. Basically, what you want to do with this is spray it inside the computer fans or computer grills and getting rid of any obstructions that might be hindering performance and hindering the computer from keeping itself cool. Now the only problem with using a can of compressed air is that it tends to disperse the dust as oppose to completely getting rid of it. So, the method I prefer is using just a regular vacuum cleaner extension like this and just getting rid of all the dust and dust particles and dust bunnies in one fells move. This is probably the best method to go and cleaning out your computer.
Now there is several different ways of increasing the life of your hard drive and some of which I dint even touch on. So, if you have any commands or extra tips, feel free to leave those at the tinkernut.com/forums and for more tutorials go to tinkernut.com.
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