Keeping Your Hard Drive
Running Safe & Fast!
Web Tech Support
Part 1

 

 

Keeping Your Hard Drive running safe and fast, steps: Web Tech Support.
By: WebTechGeek.com

 

Keep Your Hard Drive Safe Web Tech Support: Here are the steps to help you keep your computers Hard Drive running safe and FAST! The hard drive on most Windows computers hold gigabytes of data, (GB), (One gigabyte is equal to 1 billion bytes). Some of the space on each hard drive is used to store the structure of the drive, including a table of the parts of the hard drive that are free for storing new information in a table of the files and folders on the hard drive, and a list of which blocks on the hard drive store the information in which file.

If for some reason this structural information gets corrupted, you can lose some if not all of the information on the hard drive. It would be wise for you to check the structure of the information on each of your hard disks regularly by using a free Windows program called ChkDsk which not only checks the disk structure, but can also fix most of the errors that it may find on your computer.

There is another big hard drive problem that arises when you delete and create files over a long period of time. Files are stored in a series of sectors on your hard drive, and the sectors are not necessarily next to each other. While this is more of a big problem for FAT32 partitions (Windows 98,ME uses FAT32), NTFS partitions will also become fragmented after time. To fix this problem, use Windows Disk Defragmenter utility that comes free with Windows. Disk Defragmenter moves the information on your disk around to speed up access.

Most all the programs you install create temporary or backup files, which are not always deleted when they are no longer needed. Use the Windows program Disk Cleanup, this program can delete old temporary files for you.

Use Windows schedule to run these housekeeping programs for you automatically. In fact, you can have all your Scheduled Tasks program run any program on a regular basis. Remember to be sure and make regular backups of your hard drive, too. Remember to come back to webtechgeek.com for more how to's!

Use Windows Scheduled Tasks program to tell Windows to run the hard drive Cleanup program regularly. When you use Windows Scheduled Tasks to schedule running your program, be sure to run Disk Cleanup once.

Tip: If you need to restore your Windows system files to the way they were before you installed an upgrade or before your system started having problems, try the System Restore program.

Note: Windows File Protection - Windows XP comes with a feature called Windows File Protection, or WFP. WFP is running whenever Windows is running, monitoring the files that make up Windows itself. Whenever a program replaces one of the Windows system files, WFP checks whether the new file was accompanied by a "signed" (verified and encrypted) file from Microsoft. If not, or if an earlier version of a file has replaced a later version, WFP replaces the file with its own copy (from the WFP collection of duplicate files at C:\Windows\System32\dllcache).

You don't have to turn WFP on, and there's no way to turn it off. WFP doesn't display any messages when it decides to replace a system file with its own version, but it may prompt you to insert the Windows XP CD-ROM to reinstall a file.

Keep Your Hard Drive Safe Web Tech Support Page!

MORE HERE! - Web Tech Support Steps!

2. Using ChkDsk (Check Disk)

3. Defragmenting Your Drive!

4. Deleting Temporary Files with Disk Cleanup

More software downloads