PC maintenance is an important topic for anyone who owns a PC.
Looking after your PC properly can ensure it gives you trouble-free use.
Regular PC maintenance also keeps the machine's performance optimal.
In this section we guide you through some of the more important maintenance tasks.
Good PC maintenance involves a number of tasks, from keeping your keyboard and mouse clean, to cleaning up your hard drive and temporary files.
What is backing up and why should I do it?
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To back-up is to make spare copies of files and store them separately to the originals.
Computers have a tendency to go wrong from time to time, these days total hard drive failure is rare but it does happen.
One of the more common problems nowadays is the threat from viruses, with some of the more serious infecting the master boot record of a hard drive's file system. If the master boot record is infected with a virus then the Fdisk utility would most likely have to be run and the chances are the data on the drive would be lost (or at least difficult to recover).
Operating system failure and bad software installation are other things that can cause problems when it comes to recovering files.
How frequently you back up will depend on how often you use your PC and what you use it for.
The average home user will probably just have to back up any important files as and when they are changed and do a full back-up once a week/month (depending on PC use).
When PCs are used in a home office scenario then backing up should be done more frequently.
One rule of thumb would be if your important files change daily, back-up daily,
if they change weekly, back-up weekly, and so on.