Recommended maintenance plan for Windows PCs

Question

I'm helping someone out with their PC and wanted to point them to to a Windows PC periodic maintenance plan.

I was thinking they should:

1. Run Disk cleanup (cleanmgr)
2. Defragment their HD (maybe using Smart Defrag)
3. Scan the HD for errors.
4. Use the SysInternals Autorun

I found a page (posted below as an answer) that lets you schedule some of this but it would be great to have an option to just choose "Run maintenance and then shutdown my pc"

Answer 1

I would suggest the following replacements:

1. run ccleaner. Removes a lot of temp files generated by pesky applications.
2. run JkDefrag. Seems to work much better then the built in one.

3/4. Same.

EDIT: 5. run Malwarebytes periodically.

Answer 2

Configure your paging file to a fixed size. Install and configure pagedfrg to run at every boot.

Instead of disk cleanup I have my own utility called CleanAllTemp, which does exactly what the name suggests.

Always check for disk errors before defragmenting, as defrag, and perhaps also its alternatives, can sometimes miss errors and thereby screw both your file system and your day.

Apart from pagedfrg I no longer run automated cleanups, not since losing important files because disk cleanup deleted things that should not have been deleted and could not be restored because defrag had overwritten the space occupied by the files. Of course that could have been avoided by what is perhaps the most important item: Take a backup before starting the maintenance procedures.

Answer 3

If you are technically inclined, you could create a BART (Windows PE) CD that they could just put in and boot off of. Then create a batch file that downloaded updated virus/spyware definitions to a USB drive. So the idea was that they would run the batch file to update the key, then reboot with the CD in the drive.

BART is a nice option because it can actually remove rootkits, spyware, viruses, etc as the computer's Windows installation isn't running. Ultimate Boot CD for Windows (UBCD) also has a number of tools including a defragger that works quite well.

Answer 4

I use:

1. ccleaner on every boot up and set the computer to power up on a certain time in the morning before people come in.
2. I use spybot once every.. months

But can I just say, that I think windows XP has become FAR more stable and bug free ever since Microsoft stopped updating it. I mean, they still do security patches.. but ever since they stopped updating features on it, it works pretty well.

Answer 5

If you configure the paging file to be of a fixed size you don't need to run pagedefrag at all, since the pagefile won't fragment.

For my personal desktop with 4 x 500GB drives, XP Pro SP3:

(1) Disk cleanup with the built-in Windows utility, once a day.

(2) I run Diskeeper 2009 Pro in automatic defrag mode. Easy and highly effective solution since it defrags files, free space, metadata -the MFT etc automatically as required; the pagefile can be set to be defragged during boot (but I use a static PF). Some folders are in the defrag exclusion list (browser cache etc).

(3) My page file has it's own small partition on a secondary physical disk. Drives are unpartitioned otherwise.

(4) Chkdsk maybe once every couple of months...don't see a need to run it more frequently.

(5) Same with HDtune...once every couple of months just to see if the drive is running okay.

The above works perfectly for me.

Anti-malware/virus scans with Antivir, MBAM and Super Antispyware once every weekend..but that doesn't really fall under drive maintenance....

Answer 6

Here's a link to a Microsoft page explaining how to automate all of the above:

Automate Disk Cleanup on Windows Vista-7