Why You Need to Clean Up your Computer - Velox Systems

Why You Need to Clean Up your Computer

The Norton Community recently posted a good blog on why you should clean up your computers [See Blog Here]. Here’s a brief summary on what you need to do and why it matters:

Why you need to:

  1. Outdated and unused software can be a vulnerability to cyber criminals
  2. Have a clear backup system will help you recover from hardware failures and viruses easily and efficiently
  3. Being aware of what’s supposed to be on your computer, will help you realize when there’s something you didn’t ask for
    1. These programs could be sucking up your resources (at best), or (at worst) doing malicious things
  4. Keeping programs and operating systems up to date helps to keep your computer secure from known threats

What to do:

  1. Clean up unused programs
    1. Go into your “control panel” –> “programs and features” and look over all the programs you have installed and delete programs you no longer need, or that you don’t think are supposed to be there.
    2. You can sort this by “Publisher” or “Installed On” to see what’s recently come through.
    3. Typically, anything that says “Toolbar” is a good idea to just delete. Just use the built-in toolbar from Chrom or Opera
  2. Look into your backup software ( if you don’t have one, check out ShadowProtect, they have good reviews and a decent pricepoint)
    1. Has it been running effectively?
    2. Is it working the way it should?
  3. Checkout your Anti-Virus/Anti-Malware
    1. If you’re a single user, Windows Defender (Free and built-in) should be just fine. If you’re an enterprise, you’ll want something more robust
    2. Is the AV/AM updating regularly?
    3. Has their been any threats detected?
  4. Check your Windows Updates
    1. Have they updated successfully?
    2. When was the last time you checked?
  5. Run your defragmentation
    1. Good idea if you feel your PC slowing, or you have used a lot of data. This won’t work if you have a solid-state drive, but those are super fast anyway and can’t get fragmented (or, technically, they are already fragmented but it doesn’t matter).