1) Cooling System Maintenance
To prevent buildup of dust that can effect performance, it is recommended to clean out your cooling system around every 6 months. Dust clumps can decrease cooling performance and cause sub optimal operating conditions. When cleaning the cooling system, make sure you look at the CPU cooler, any radiators you might have, the power supply fan, case fans and fans on your GPU. These can be cleaned with compressed air to make sure they operate at full effectiveness. It is also officially recommended to change the thermal paste on your CPU every 3 years or so. Before doing any of these steps, make sure your PC is powered down and unplugged.
2) Storage Maintenance
As far as storage goes, disk cleanup can be ran every few months to remove temporary files and junk files. If you’re working with a mechanical hard drive, regular disk de-fragmentation will be beneficial (Note: solid state drives should not be de-fragmented). It’s preferable to at least have 10% of your total storage capacity to be free space. If you find yourself constantly having full storage, it may be time for a storage expansion.
3) Software Maintenance
To avoid your system’s resources from being spent on unnecessary programs, it’s a good idea to remove things that you don’t need running in the background or programs that you no longer need. In addition, managing programs that launch at startup can reduce boot times. Also pay attention to when there are new driver updates for anything in your computer so that all components are up to date. Another good idea for software maintenance is to perform regular system backups that help protect against data loss.
Popular Maintenance Tools and Software
Disk Cleanup Utilities
- CCleaner
- Disk Cleanup (Windows)
- DaisyDisk (Mac)
- BleachBit
Antivirus Software
- Norton
- McAfee
- Bitdefender
- Kaspersky
Monitoring Tools
- MSI Afterburner
- HWMonitor
- Core Temp
- Task Manager