PC Maintenance-What Do You Do?
 

It's been almost 2 years since we built my sons' rigs. They are all running fine but seems to me I should be doing some sort of tune up or clean out. Should I?

What do you do for periodic maintenance and well-care for your PC?

Windows 10 has built in maintenance routines for the most part. The only thing I run manually on my Windows machines is the built in Disk Cleanup tool.

Virus scan
Malware scan
Defrag
Plenty of PC cleanup utilities out there.

No longer necessary with the most recent OSes. If the machine isn't showing serious signs of performance issues, then just leave it alone.

I highly recommend not using any 3rd party PC Cleaner/Registry Fixer/Speed Booster/etc. They are all shit.

FYP

open it up and clean it out with canned air

Most of them will actually make things WORSE in the long run.

Probably the biggest, best tip there is honestly.

Thanks for the replies. I didn't realize Win10 performed maintenance.
We do virus scans and compressed air clean out (it's dusty her in AZ) fairly regularly so maybe a defrag and leave it at that.

What say you on organizing your hard drive, any tips?
SSD, what do you keep on it? Theirs are all 250 GB so there isn't room for much.

FYI... never try and defrag an SSD drive. It's 100% unnecessary due to the very different way it stores data. It will also drastically reduce the life span of the drive if you try it.

Defrag got a very undeserved reputation as being a fix all maintenance procedure back in the early Windows days. But it's the equivalent of blowing on the NES cartridge to make it work. 95% of the time it was unnecessary and did nothing to improve actual performance.

All of this. Completely unnecessary to defrag modern filesystems and will actually shorten the life of an SSD.

I don't do shit.

But don't stick your hands in there when you spray. If you sneeze you'll pull all of the wiring loose. And then you'll end up paying someone to plug all of that shit back in.

I unplug mine, take both side panels off, and use a leaf blower on it. Canned air takes too much damn time and doesn't do a good enough job, imo.

thats actually not a terrible idea. I just blow mine out every 2-3 weeks so it doesnt get build up on it.