Computer Maintenence
By: Greg

Ok, this is a really simple discussion. Your average computer user, you know, the ones that walk into a computer shop and ask for a Pentium 4 board and an Athlon XP chip, then ask us to install it. You kindly say "You can not put this chip in a Pentium 4 board". But hopefully this will put your mind at ease - Disk Cleanup isn't hard to do. First, i suggest defragging your harddrive atleast once a month.
I suggest a program called Diskeeper , from Executive Software. Another thing I always suggest doing is partitioning the drive, if possible. Three Partitions, Four if you count the swap file. [OS | Programs | Data | Swap File (Format it in FAT for best performance)]
This limits fragmentation on your OS's partition, and if Windows crashes and kills something (it usually does) you have your data safe partition. This also increases performance, by moving your swap file.

How to set swap file location
Right click My Computer. Click Advanced. Click Performance "Settings". Click Advanced again. Click the "Change" button under Virtual memory. Click the partitioned drive, and make the swap file size STATIC so it stays the same size. The best is 1.5 times your current amount of ram. Don't do this unless you have 128MB of RAM or more.
Here is a chart:
128 = 192
256 = 384
384 = 576
512 = 768
640 = 960
768 = 1100MB
1GB = 1500MB
If it's needed past a gig, i doubt it.

If you can't do this, don't wanna do this, or are lazy - it's ok. Not everyone can keep clean. Not everyone cares, actually.

Humor Story
I was working in a busy local store as Tech Support when a colleague passes a telephone call on to me. A customer had bought a new PC from us and was having trouble sending emails, apparently his mail was too big to be sent. Anyway, I took the call and was greeted by a very confused old voice. I asked the user to describe in as much detail as possible what he was doing and what errors he was receiving. It started off fine, he was doing everything correctly - writing his mail, making sure his friends address was correct, pressing the button, but the mail didn't send. I was getting quite confused at this point, as I have always found that older people tend to use god awful terminology to describe anything at all, so I ask him to elaborate on the steps again. He explains once more, but this time I get the clincher. He went on to say, "I write my mail to my friend, I make sure his address is correct on the envelope, I put a stamp on the envelope, I seal the envelope, I try to post my letter in the postbox at the front of the PC, but it is too small." It takes a few seconds to click, then a wave of laughter starts, I press the "mute" button and carry on laughing. In between fits I calm the user down and advise him to buy a book on how to use email, I advise "Email for Dummies." The stupid guy had been trying to "post" his mail into the floppy drive bay slot, expecting by some marvel of science to arrive at his friends PC immediately. It made my day!