Chapter 30. Performing Routine Maintenance

Your personal computer is a curious combination of digital data and temperamental machinery. To keep your system running smoothly, it pays to perform some regular maintenance tasks. In particular, it's wise to do the following on a regular basis:

  • Check your disks for file system and media errors.

  • Defragment your hard disks to optimize file access.

  • Make sure that you always have enough space on your hard disk by getting rid of files you no longer need and compressing files if necessary.

  • Perform regular backups of data and system files.

Checking Disks for Errors

Errors in disk media and in the file system ...

Get Microsoft® Windows® XP Inside Out, 2nd Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.