Computer Maintenance

Hardware drivers are an essential part of your computer system. It's these device drivers that enable your hardware to talk to your operating system. Your computer's OS is often updated via the windows update wizard, through which security patches and service packs are downloaded and installed to your system. Device driver updates may occur as well if your computer system's hardware manufacturer has a "Windows Logo" approval or digital signature that basically enables Microsoft to distribute these driver updates to windows users throughout the world.

Hardware that does not have digitally signed drivers won't get its updates from windows, so the more updated and refreshed your windows OS is the farther behind the unsigned hardware gets if not updated manually.

This can begin to cause errors and a slow down of your computer's performance. It's important to keep you hardware updated as well as your OS to keep a good balance in your entire system.

Manual updates of device drivers can be time consuming and in some cases tedious depending on who manufactured your hardware. Computer hardware from companies overseas may not have a well established support website where driver updates are constantly posted. These are the types of devices that often function with generic drivers that windows provides.

The best and most effective way to update your drivers is to use a driver installer, also known as driver update tools or utilities. These tools make it much easier to download drivers because they query thousands of driver databases and manufacturer support sites for the latest updates according to what's installed on your computer. There's no need to do manual searches or even bother to look up your hardware's name or model number, driver tools find this information automatically and download only the most relevant driver versions for your hardware.

This is unfortunately one of the steps in computer maintenance that many people still ignore or do with little regard for its importance. First of all, there's a difference between spyware and viruses. Viruses are more complex programs that contain more extensive code and can be self contained, and in many cases can replicate themselves to infect other systems in the same network. Viruses are also known as malware and designed to disrupt services and computer functionality.

Spyware on the other hand is sometimes hosted on web servers or suspicious sites where adult material may be hosted as well. Spyware is usually triggered by normal requests such as accessing these sites via a web browser. It may also be delivered via email or pirated software.

Spyware also comes in different types and flavors. Some types are designed to spy on your web activities and then pop up annoying windows with ads for products that you may be interested in buying. This type of spyware is usually bundled with Peer to Peer file swapping software and although this is a less dangerous form of spyware, it is intrusive and should be removed.

More dangerous forms of spyware are key loggers, which is designed to record keystrokes. This is where it gets very risky for the user, if this software invades your system you could potentially become a victim of identity theft and lose access to all your online accounts.

As a general rule always avoid accessing malicious or suspicious sites where the material provided is questionable or clearly illegal. These are the sites that are laden with this type of software.

Virus protection is a must and most virus protection software do a good job, if kept up to date, blocking these infections. Most people online have anti virus software already installed but it can't do it all. Spyware protection is a separate tool that must also be installed to keep intrusions out. The most ideal level of protection is to have these two types of protection installed and updating automatically.

The windows registry is a database containing very critical information about your computer system and the software installed on it. The registry's main function is to store the configurations of these software programs and the hardware as well. Here we'll quickly discuss two methods on how to clean your registry for optimal performance.

The registry is a very sensitive piece of information on your computer, it can easily become corrupted by spyware and viruses, additionally if software programs are often installed and removed, the registry never gets a proper cleaning to remove traces and left overs of references to programs that are no longer needed from the old programs. Over time this accumulates to the extent of severe system slow downs and crashes.

There are two ways of getting the windows registry properly cleaned up, one is to manually clean your registry and the other, and the recommended method, is to use a registry cleaning tool.

How do you manually clean your registry? Well it's not a simple one two and three, but we'll cover it just as well. I must warn you that this is definitely the long way to go about it and the riskiest as well, if you make the incorrect changes and delete references to installed programs you will ruin your system state and may end up with more trouble on your hands. So please proceed with caution.

First things first, before you even start to make any changes to your computer's registry, back it up. Follow the link below on how to backup and restore your registry for instructions, or follow these directions. Go to Start menu > select "Run", in the run line field type "regedit" click ok. On the top menu of the regedit window click on file, go down to "Export" and give your backup file a name and save. There, you just backed up your registry, now you can start making changes.

Ok, in order to manually optimize registry settings you need to basically go down the different entries found under the "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE" section, this is where software and hardware entries are recorded. Again, proceed with caution, you will need to find references to the software or hardware you no longer have installed and remove traces of these entries or entire keys.

Why is it more effective to use a registry cleaning tool? Well, these are specialized tools that do a much better job than your eyes and hands, simply put. Registry cleaners can quickly scan your computer settings for hardware and software installed and compares that to the registry settings in your HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE section for accurate entries. Once the registry is scanned and software and hardware entries that do not exist are found, they're cleaned up properly. Before making any changes to your registry these tools, have built in capabilities to backup your registry as well. You could spend hours optimizing your registry manually and a few more hours rebuilding your system if you make a serious mistake. Or you could be done in minutes with an automated registry optimizer.