General Device Maintenance for Windows
It is common for people to think they need a new laptop or desktop after a few years of use, and it is running slow. However, I’m going to show you a few tricks that I have perfected over the years to help a machine run in tip top shape. These are especially great to do after you have been uninstalling and reinstalling video games on them or just general use from office activity. These are, in my professional experience, the General Maintenance your company should be running on their Windows machines once a year, but probably is not…
-Work Machine-
Please note that for any commands I’m referencing to with quotes, you will not enter the quotes, it’s just the industry standard when specifying a string of data. We’ve all been there, on a work machine and it’s locked down on the permissions. Great news, you can run “gpupdate /force” (Group Policy Update) from Command Prompt. It’s pretty fast and either works or gives you an error that you can screenshot and send to your Service Desk, saving a ton of time. Fundamentally what it does is checks with your company’s server to make sure your computer follows the parameters of the domain. It’s typically the first thing your IT person will run and can be done with any account.
-Personal Machine-
If you haven’t already done it, you should uninstall any Bloatware. This is software that came on your computer when you got it, you don’t necessarily need or use it and it doesn’t seem to contribute to how your computer runs the way you are going to use it. Navigate to the “uninstall a program” area of your Control Panel and you will see the list, then just right click > uninstall (sometimes with stuff like Office there is a “Repair” option). If you see “Wave Browser” while in the control panel you will want to get rid of that at once and run a malware scan; actually, if you see any program you don’t recognize, Google it and/or the publisher to check that it’s legitimate or see what it does. (Note: modern browsers have Java built in, you no longer need it installed on your machine.) You may also have to do it from what we used to call the “Start” area and have no idea why they changed it, er the windows icon and “All Apps”.
-Light Clean-
Clearing your temp folders might seem like it’s not that important, but the closer your SSD drive gets to 50% the slower it performs. This is the random cache your computer stores during regular use of moving files, installing programs, error logs…etc. You’d be surprised at just how junked up they can get, I’ve seen them take up to 8GB worth of data.
From any account: Go to start > Run and type in “%temp%”. (The actual path is “C:\Users\\AppData\Local\Temp”)
With administrative rights, follow the same steps but instead type “temp”.(“C:\Windows\Temp”)
-Update Drivers-
If it’s not one thing, it’s the drivers. Easiest way you can check is to look for a caution mark on one of the listed items in the Device Manger; you might have to drop down the tree. These are the kernel code that binds your operating system and programs with the motherboard. You can set them to auto update, but sometimes the list doesn’t synchronize. Some laptops such as Lenovo have a program that you can download from their website or find in the Microsoft Store like “Lenovo Vantage” and it can be ran from a user account. If you want to look for them yourself the command is: “wmic bios get serialnumber”. The top two to look for and download if they have a newer version are the BIOS and Firmware/Chipset Management Engine.
-More in Depth Commands-
(You will need administrative rights)
Similar to Linux there are terminal commands that are native to the Windows environment that you can run to improve your system. To run these, go to start > Command Prompt > right click > run as administrator:
#1 System File Checker = "sfc /scannow"
This one will take roughly 10 minutes but it’s safe to use the machine while it runs; however, I wouldn’t install anything while it goes. It basically goes through your filesystem and makes sure everything lines up the way it should be, the right system files point to the correct location and there’s no junk files that shouldn’t be there linking to something else. This is just layman’s term, and feel free to look into it more but I assure you it’s perfectly fine to run even if you don’t know what you’re doing.
#2 DISM = "dism /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth"
It can take 15 to 45 minutes, depending on how bad your machine is, but again it’s safe to use while it runs. This connects with the Microsoft servers responsible for updates and ensures that your operating systems image matches the lines of code it should have. You can actually do a lot with dism commands.
#3 Check Disk = "chkdsk /f /r /x" (stands for: find, repair, dismount)
Please note that you will not be able to use the machine until it’s finished running and it can take up to an hour. It should automatically restart your machine after entering it so make sure to save and close everything beforehand. It sometimes gets stuck at “100%, please do not turn off or restart your machine”, but it’s safe to hard reset (press the power button or pull cord). This checks your hard drive for any irregularities and makes sure nothing is corrupt or damaged. There are several ways to run this, however this is the one I find most useful as it runs it at a very low level right after bios when it is loading the kernel (code that makes hardware talk to software).
#4 Cipher = "cipher /w:c:\"
This one will take a while, like up to 2 hours, and I wouldn’t plan on using it, so it goes faster. For when you drastically want to really clean your hard drive to sell or donate This command wipes the dark void of the strange quarks files turn into after the recycling bin. Basically, preventing anyone from restoring anything you deleted and maximizing the free space available in some parts per million way. — And that’s pretty much it! There are a few snazzy programs that I will leave below to help keep your computer stay in shape and safe. Other than that, Congratulations!!! You could be an entry level IT person now.
Noteworthy programs: ATF Cleaner, JRT Remover, Glary Utilities, CCleaner and Malwarebytes