Making Those PCs Last

“A properly maintained machine can last a long time,” says Frank Ballatore, president of The New England Computer Group, a full-service technology consulting firm for small- and medium-sized businesses. “But it takes some actual effort from the owner to make that happen.” In these economic times, I think it’s worth the effort.

Ballatore has a useful checklist of maintenance tasks that all companies should build into their systems to extend the useful life of PCs:

1.) Install spyware and antivirus programs. This is the technology equivalent of brushing your teeth and washing your hands. Antivirus programs like Symantec and AVG are quite effective at eliminating viruses as long as they’re updated regularly. Getting rid of spyware is a much bigger problem. “When there is a sudden performance drop on a PC, 99 percent of the time there is spyware running in the background,” says Ballatore. There are dozens of good programs like Lavasoft’s Ad-Aware or Microsoft’s Windows Defender that detect and remove spyware from your computer, and some are free. But if the problem is too far gone, you might have to back up your data and reinstall the operating system. 

2.) Run diagnostics. Most PCs have basic diagnostic and maintenance tools built into the system. In Windows PCs, you can find them in “System Tools” in the “Accessories” folder. To maintain your PC and safeguard your data, Ballatore recommends people back up and run the disk defragmenter and the disk cleanup tool at least once a month, if not once a week. It’s easy and you can schedule these functions to run at night when you don’t need the computers.

3.) Uninstall unnecessary programs. Over time, every computer gets bloated with legitimate software nobody uses or needs. Some of these programs use resources even when they’re not being used. So go through the “Add” or “Remove” programs menu and uninstall any program you haven’t used since the Clinton Administration.

4.) Increase RAM. The quickest way to goose the performance of a PC is to give it more memory — or RAM (Random-access memory). If you’ve still got 256 megabytes of RAM in your system, your PC is going to have a hard time running an application made in the last three years. One gigabyte (1 billion bytes) is the minimum for any self-respecting PC owner, and you can get it for less than $50.

Follow these simple steps and you’ll get more out of your PC investments. And remember, when you sheepishly pull out your five-year old laptop at a client meeting, that a PC is a tool, not a status symbol.

Dan Briody is the author of two books and is the former Executive Editor of CIO Insight Magazine, a leading publication for information technology managers. He is also a frequent contributor on technology topics for Wired, Inc. and Business Week magazines.