Insider Power Techniques for Microsoft® Windows® XP

Setting Up a Maintenance Schedule

Maintenance is effective only if it’s done regularly, but there’s a fine line to be navigated here. If maintenance is performed too often, it can become a burden and interfere with more interesting tasks; if it’s performed too seldom, it becomes ineffective. So how often should you perform the maintenance steps listed in this chapter? Here are our schedule guidelines:

• Check your hard disk for errors. Run a basic scan about once a week. Run the more thorough disk surface scan once a month. (The surface scan takes a long time, so run it when you won’t be using your computer for a while.)

• Check free disk space. Do this once about once a month. If you have a drive in which the free space is getting low, check it about ...