Setting Up a Maintenance Schedule

Maintenance is effective only if it’s done regularly, but there’s a fine line to be navigated here. If maintenance is performed too often, it can become a burden and interfere with more interesting tasks; if it’s performed too seldom, it becomes ineffective. So how often should you perform the maintenance steps listed in this chapter? Here are our schedule guidelines:

• Check your hard disk for errors. Run a basic scan about once a week. Run the more thorough disk surface scan once a month. (The surface scan takes a long time, so run it when you won’t be using your computer for a while.)

• Check free disk space. Do this once about once a month. If you have a drive in which the free space is getting low, check it about once a week.

• Delete unnecessary files. If free disk space isn’t a problem, run this chore about once every two or three months.

• Defragment your hard disk. How often you defragment your hard disk depends on how often you use your computer. If you use it every day, you should run Disk Defragmenter about once a week. If your computer doesn’t get heavy use, you probably need to run Disk Defragmenter only once a month or so.

• Set restore points. Windows XP already sets regular system checkpoints, so you need only create your own restore points when you’re installing a program or device or making some other major change to your system.

• Back up your files. Perform a full backup of all your documents, as well as a backup of the system state, about once a month. Do a differential backup of modified files once a week. Do an incremental backup of modified files every day.

• Check Windows Update. If you’ve turned off automatic updating, you should check in with the Windows Update Web site about once a month.

• Check for security vulnerabilities. Run the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer once a month. You should also pay a monthly visit to Microsoft’s Security And Privacy site to keep up to date on the latest security news, get security and virus alerts, and more:

  http://www.microsoft.com/security/

• Verify digitally signed files. If other people use your computer regularly, you should run the Signature Verification Tool every couple of months.

• Review event viewer logs. If your system appears to be working fine, you need to check the Application and System log files just weekly or every couple of weeks. If the system has a problem, check the logs daily to look for Warning or Error events.

Remember as well that Windows XP offers a number of options for running most of these maintenance steps automatically:

• If you want to run a task every day, you can set it up to launch automatically at startup, as we describe in Chapter 4, “Starting Up and Shutting Down.”

• Use the Task Scheduler (Start, All Programs, Accessories, System Tools, Scheduled Tasks) to set up a program on a regular schedule. Note that some programs, particularly Disk Defragmenter, can’t be scheduled in their GUI form. You need to use the command-line version instead.

• The Backup program enables you to schedule backup jobs. In the Backup Utility window, select the Schedule Jobs tab and click Add Job.

• Use the automatic updating feature instead of checking for Windows updates by hand.