10 Tips To Maintain Your Laptop Like New

Laptops are overtaking the Desktops. But we tend to forget or neglect to maintain our Laptop computer. Here are 10 Tips to maintain Your Laptop computer like new. So that you get the maximum efficiency from your Laptop, also increase its lifespan.

10 Tips on how to maintain your Laptop like new

1. Save it from dust.

Dust and smog it’s everywhere, but a little care and cleaning will go a long way to enhance the performance and life of your Laptop. When not in use keep it inside its own bag.

Use a small brush (a simple paintbrush will work fine) to clean and dust off the small spaces in-between the keypads and hard-to-reach corners.

On the underside accumulation of dust can clog the ventilation areas causing overheating. If you have a vacuum cleaner would be the best option to suck out all dust from inside.

2. Keep Your Laptop Cool.

HEAT is a killer for any component of your laptop. Protect your laptop from excessive heat. A Laptop used in a cool and dry environment will always perform more efficiently and faster too.

For reasons best known to the manufacturers, almost all laptops seem to have ventilation grills on the underside of the laptop.

If you have the habit of working on your laptop by keeping it on a sofa or bed or even on your Lap (thatโ€™s where it’s supposed to be). Then you are killing your system.

These surfaces being soft block the vents underneath the laptop.

The best solution would be to use a Lap tray or better still a Laptop cooler. If you are in doubt then try using(installing) a free Laptop overheating Monitoring software and see the difference in your CPU temperature while using it with or without a Lap tray or Lap coolers.

3.ย  Install a Good Antivirus and Firewall software.

Without an Antivirus your Laptop is Vulnerable to attacks by viruses, Malware Spyware, etc.ย  Make sure you install a good antivirus Free or Paid and always update the virus database.

The same holds true for a good Firewall. A firewall software protects your Laptop from any external intrusions by hackers, Malware, which may steal all your personal information, without your knowledge.

If you share files with Pen drives or external drives, be cautious and always use a USB gourd software to detect any auto executable files.

I may stress this point here to disable Autorun feature in your Laptop as an added safety measure.

4. Uninstall all Unused programs

Programs which you never use. Why keep them? ย un-install programs that you donโ€™t use or require. This will not only get you more free disk space but also make your system cleaner and faster.

After uninstalling, donโ€™t forget to use a good registry cleaner to delete all registry entries made by the program. A broken registry entry will further slow down your system.

5 Defragment your hard disk at regular Interval

Depending on your usage pattern you need to defragment your hard disk at regular intervals. If you install and uninstall programs frequently, this may result in fragmentation of files, making the Disks read-write head a hard time to fetch data, making your system slower.

Regular defragmentation does the task of getting those pieces in one place or placing them at the nearest empty block thereby fetching files is faster, and your system runs faster.

6. Keep the System Registry Clean

Your systemโ€™s Registry is the heart and soul of your Laptop/PC. Never modify or play with the registry unless you know what you are doing.

Always use a good Registry cleaner to scan and fix any Registry errors like a broken link. A corrupt registry may render your system un-bootable, unstable, and behave abnormally.

Make it a point to use a good Un-installer, to find and delete all orphan files of the program.

7. Check and Minimize your Startup programs

When you boot your system, besides windows default start-up components many programs also embed themselves in the start-up directory. The more the number of programs in the startup lists the longer your system will take to boot.

I feel except for your Antivirus program, Firewall program, you can safely disable other programs from the startup list, this will make a noticeable difference in your system boot time.(your system will boot much faster).

In case you missed: How To Prevent Programs Starting Automatically In Windows to check and disable any unwanted programs from the start-up

8: Find and Delete all Temporary files and Internet Temporary files.

Windows makes a lot of temporary files(for its own use but fails to clean up). Every time you surf the net, lots of temporary files like cookies, URLs, etc are created and accumulated.

Over time these may grow into gigabyte size, and eventually slowing down your system. Clean and delete such temporary files periodically to keep your system running smoothly.

9: Empty the Re-Cycle Bin.

This may sound silly, but it does matter too. When you delete a file it doesnโ€™t get deleted immediately but resides in your Re-cycle bin, unless of course, you have the habit of pressing the โ€œshiftโ€ key before clicking on the delete button.

So any file in the re-cycle bin basically is occupying your C drive space, so delete files (empty recycle bin) from time to time.

10: Protect your Laptop from Power surges

Re-placing your Laptops power supply (Battery charger) or the Battery itself is much more expensive than a Desktop Computer.

Protect your Laptop from power surges by using good Power surge protectors like the โ€œSpike busterโ€ which are readily available at a very cheap price.

This will not only protect your battery charger, Battery but also the hardware component of your Laptop.

These above the Ten Tips to maintain your laptop. These tips are applicable not only for maintaining your Laptops but also for any Computer for that matter.
How do you take care of your Laptop? I hope these TIPS were of some help, share with us.

Suggested Reading

1. How to put your Laptop into hibernation mode automatically.ย 

2. How to increase your Laptop Battery Life.