Things you actually need to do to your PC!

Windows evolves, settings become more ‘user friendly’ and interfaces become more graphical. Of course what this tends to mean is that in the last few iterations of Windows, settings are now spread around in various places, some of which have few options and very large fonts!

What should you be doing regularly to your PC to make sure that it works as it used to? There are many online tools and guides that confuse this question and try to spam, sell and generally seduce you!

In this article, we go through a few simple steps. I’ll assume Windows 11, but where possible will use the old Control Panel so it will apply to most recent versions.

Before we begin, let’s deal with a few simple myths and pieces of advice;

• Get those updates! Windows Updates are still irritating and it’s harder to ignore them than it used to be so chances are you are getting these. Yes - sometimes they break things, yes - occasionally they need to be regressed, and yes - it’s irritating when you want to go to bed and they are whirring away! Despite all of this they are essential to fix bugs and more importantly any security issues. Keep those browsers up to date too.

• Windows antivirus and firewall. These are much better than they used to be and depending on your situation may be perfectly sufficient for your needs. Make sure they are turned on if you aren’t using any other software to do this job. If you feel that you need more security by all means use a bespoke package, something free is probably fine but do your research and don’t let them scare you! If your PC is on a private network and you surf and email sensibly, browser security is on, and you don’t click on links in emails - free will suffice. In older iterations of Windows, it was possible to run multiple antivirus programs at the same time and in real time! This meant that the poor PC would struggle under the processing needed to do all this and would probably have been better off with a virus! So if you use a standalone piece of software the Windows antivirus should turn off, but make sure you only run one!

• Browsers! A very quick comment about browsers. Of course, these all differ but they all offer security options within their settings. Each to their own with a lot of these, but the one thing I change on all my devices is the cookie setting. You’re going to need 1st party but those 3rd party cookies are doing nothing for you other than tracking for organisations you’ve probably never heard of. Block 3rd party cookies!

• How you use Windows 11 is of course up to you. However, remember you can get rid of most of the annoying things. Make sure you change the taskbar, start menu and so on. It’s not as customisable as it used to be, but you can change a lot of the irritating stuff that is either in the wrong place or completely irrelevant. A nice ‘Show Desktop’ button on the taskbar is essential to me as the button at the end is way too small and far away!

Now we’ve got that out of the way, let’s go through some maintenance that you should be doing when you’ve got nothing better to do. They don’t need to be done daily or weekly, but yearly is too infrequent.

Recycle Bin

It may sound obvious, but I guess you have hundreds if not thousands of items in your Recycle Bin! By now you’ve probably forgotten why you deleted them and if you have another version somewhere. It’s best to keep on top of this by periodically reviewing the contents of the Bin and emptying it. As a piece of therapy look at the used space on your main drive before and after and see how much you’ve gained!

Drive Cleaning

Click on ‘This PC’ on your desktop and all the drives and devices will appear. Right-click on the one you want to do and select ‘Properties’ from the menu.

Disk Clean-up has now gone from here, but before we go and find it there are a couple of interesting things. Under ‘Tools’ there are two options of note. If you’ve had any issues, the Error Checking will be worth running. Back in the day, people were obsessed with Defragging which is the other option here. This works happily and automatically and you can ignore it!

Now how do we clean up those temporary files and Windows Update files via Disk Clean-up? Microsoft has removed it from the right-click drive properties and hidden it away. They have also added new functionality within the Start Menu Settings that offer a more visual approach (see Start - Settings - System - Storage).

To get to Disk Clean-up now, you can either type ‘Disk Clean’ into the Windows Search box or you can navigate to it from the Control Panel - Windows Tools - Disk Clean-up’. Either way, once you’ve found it, select the drive you’re interested in. It’s most useful on your main drive that holds the operating system. Once it’s run the analysis it will show you a list of what's taking up space that you may not need. If you click on ‘Clean up System Files’, it will show everything once it’s scanned the drive. Go through and select what you want to get rid of, the most important things are the Temporary Files and Windows Update Files. Thumbnails look massive, but chances are they will be re-generated again anyway.

Reliability History & Event Viewer

A fun one to look at, and can actually be useful if you’re having problems. From the Control Panel, find Security And Maintenance, and then select Maintenance. Report Problems should be ‘on’, and underneath you’ll see a link to Reliability History. This will show a graph by day with symbols against each one. The blue ‘i’ is information, the yellow triangle a warning, and you can guess what the red cross is for! Click on the days with symbols to see the reports and further technical details as required. Probably a good idea to investigate any red crosses!

A similar tool, the Event Viewer can be found under Windows Tools in the Control Panel. The most useful is the Administrative Events under Custom Views. This shows an interesting list of system events and can be very useful if your system has start-up problems, for example. Don’t panic if you have errors here but no noticeable issues, they are probably certificate or authentication errors that sorted themselves out once everything was running.

Indexes

Again in the Control Panel, find the Indexing Options and click on them. Indexing allows the system to find data quicker by making an index of it in advance. It’s important that your main drives and user data are indexed - use the Modify option if this isn’t the case. Depending on your PC this may slow the machine down when it’s idle building the indexes, but this shouldn't be an issue. If unindexed, when you click on folders in File Explorer it may be slow to show them and Search will be painful!

Remove unwanted programs

Some more housekeeping. Periodically check and remove apps/programs that you don’t need anymore. At best, they are taking up room, at worst running in the background taking up resources. You can remove them from within the software itself usually, but anything nefarious will not have the option. You can use ‘Programs and Features’ in the Control Panel and the new option in Start - Settings - Installed Apps. Both offer options to remove and repair programs but they do differ slightly with regard to what they show. I would check both!

System Start-up

So much software you install will happily put itself in your PC's Start-up routine. You’ll notice that your PC will take longer and longer to boot and load and this is why. The old CTRL-ALT-DEL combo will still bring up the Task Manager. This shows everything running on your machine, if something is particularly chewing up resources you can identify it here. Now with regard to Start-up, there’s a menu on the left-hand side, one option of which is ‘Start-up Apps’. Once you select this you’ll see a list of what programs run when your machine boots up, along with the impact on the start time. Go through these and disable anything that you don’t want. Of course, some are useful, but some are just to make it quicker when you start up that particular application, which if it’s used infrequently, is a waste of resources. You’ll find that some are looking for updates, which again may not be a good use of resources. Google anything unclear, and try it. If you get any problems you can easily enable the programs again.

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This is just a taste of what you can do ‘under the hood’ of your PC. Hopefully, you’ve found a whole mass of options whilst looking for these that we haven’t talked about. Just beware though, you can cause chaos, so don’t be too cavalier and if in doubt check online the setting you are about to change! Write down or screen grab before you change it and be prepared to System Restore if you cause real trouble.