Dear Malvary, I think this is a bit opportunistic. The computers I've had at work and home have not needed to be rebuilt unless there was a serious problem. What one should do, and this might be what he meant, is to defragment the drives every few months. With lots of disk activity, adding new files, installing programmes, updates etc... the files can end up being stored as lots of little fragments which slows down performance, and works the drive harder. Defragmenting finds the bits and puts them back next to each other, a bit like rearranging books on the right shelves. This is a really simple tool hidden under Programs>Accessories>System Tools. Click on it, click analyse drive and let it run, then if it says it needs defrag click defrag.. No need to pay someone to do it and it is safe. I've just redone mine. You may find that it says it needs more disk space to run, make it run anyway - that can free some space, and just run it again.
Other things that can help are to do a disk clean up, which will find all those pesky temp files and unused bits and bobs for deletion. They can take a while on a big disk. Oh and empty the recycle bin, I once freed up 20 gigs on a colleague's machine that way! If things are deleted, yes the file remains on the disk but the system knows it can and will be overwritten in time. If you want to wipe it fully before selling or trashing- use disk washer or something similar which writes repeated nonsense over all the disk space. Or hit the hard drive with a big hammer . One last thing... back-up, backup, BACKUP your stuff. Especially if your computer is getting elderly (3+ years); hard drives and other bits can fail quite suddenly. I had a computer go bad on me at work a couple of years ago, and I lost a little but could have lost 10 years of stuff without a backup. After 3 hard drive failures in a row, I started multiple backups just in case the backup drive failed. Hope this helps, Louise Date: Wed, 16 Apr 2008 09:21:35 -0400 From: "Malvary J Cole" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: [lace-chat] Computer question - advice needed When I was in England recently my sister, Jacquie, had problems with her laptop. As we both needed it for our notes for Convention and to check e-mails we took it into a local computer shop to find out what was wrong. It turned out to be something simple to do with the timing out when it was on sleep. For £65.00, he didn't exactly fix it but did tell us how to short circuit the problem when it happened again as soon as we got it home. As part of our discussions with him he said that we needed to remove all the software off the computer and reload it (did we also need to reformat the hard-drive too?). This should be done every six months. He was willing to do that for us too, for a price. We declined. As Jacquie is not logged into Lace or Chat on her laptop while living with my dad she asked if I'd write to chat on her behalf to ask if anyone else does it. Is this something that seriously needs to be done or is it a scam he has thought up to make money. She has been pondering on it and thought that when you remove stuff you still always leave a footprint, so if you are constantly removing and reloading programmes, there'd surely be loads of extra bits floating around which would make the matter worse not better. She has had the laptop since 2004 so according to him it should have been done 6 or 7 times by now. She is not aware of it being any slower than it ever was; it seems to hesitate when the fan comes on/is about to come on, but it always has done that. Your thoughts would be most helpful. Thanks Malvary in Ottawa where the snow piles are slowly melting, but it is supposed to be up to 20c by the end of the week ********************************* To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line: unsubscribe lace-chat [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
