How to maintain your computer

Okay, so you have a computer. An important part of keeping a computer running is maintenance. Without doing certain things to keep your computer healthy, it will slowly bog down and cease to function. I am going to explain different ways to maintain and keep it running like new.

1. Virus Protection! Very important, if not THE MOST important peice of software you can have. A lot of people have it, but I have seen countly time people who have it and then never update it(older virus scans don't have automatic update sometimes). If you don't update it, it won't do you any good. New virus's come out everyday, if you arn't protected with the most recent, you will get infected. A good free virus scan is AVG , which can be downloaded here - http://www.download.com/AVG-Anti-Virus-Free-Edition/3000-2239_4-10320142.html.
Also, some people use AVAST, which is also a very good free virus scan. http://www.download.com/Avast-Home-Edition/3000-2239_4-10019223.html

2. Spyware! Spyware is what tracks you where ever you go, say you go to a fishing site a few time, well spyware will track that site and keep in its memory that you like fishing, so whenever you are browsing the web, pop up will come up and have fishing advertisements because they know what you like. This kind of spyware isn't super bad or harmful, but certain types on spyware can bog down you machine and take up a lot of your system resources. It's good regulary clear your system of these types of files. There are two main programs i use which are free and work amazingly good. Spybot Search and Destroy which can be downloaded at http://www.download.com/Spybot-Search-Destroy/3000-8022_4-10122137.html and Ad-aware which can be downloaded at http://www.download.com/Ad-Aware-2007/3000-8022_4-10045910.html . Althought they both somewhat do the same things, I always run both to make sure everything is gone.

3. Emails! Emails are one of the highest ways to get virus and spyware. NEVER open emails from people you don't know esspecially if they have attachments. Also, if you get emails from a friend and it seems odd and there is an attachment, dont open it, call them and make sure they sent it and it isn't a virus. Always be aware of what you are opening and think before you do so.

4. Defragment! Defragmenting can speed up your computer and get rid of a lot of not nessessary space usage. What is does is compresses and organized your clusters and sectors so they are more compact and not spread all over the place, this in turn give you more room on your hard drive. To get to your defragmenter go to *Start > All programs > Accessories > System Tools > Disk Defragmenter. Also while you are here run your disk cleanup BEFORE you do the defragment. The first time you do the defrag it might take a while because it has never been done or atleast not in a long time.

Okay so that's the basics of maintaining your computer, please let me know if theres anything I missed or should add. Look back soon for regular updates and new blogs on computer how to!