Last week I mentioned Chromebooks and Antivirus software. Today in continuing with sharing emails and answers we look at the following questions.
"How often do you run Windows Update, defrag, cleaning, and other computer maintenance?" Wow, huge question with a multitude of answers. First I suggest for most users you should set windows updates to run automatically. With Windows 10 your only choice may be to have it automatically update, there are varying reports. If you now run the update manually they come out on "Patch Tuesday." Or, the second Tuesday of each month. So you are good to run your update any time after that. I would recommend you do it each month for security reasons if no other.
Defragging and cleaning really depend on how often you use your computer. I have also recommended here before that you use CCleaner (piriform.com) for cleaning/removing old files and refreshing your registry. It is an excellent program. For defragging I recommend another Piriform product called "Defraggler," found on the same site under "Downloads."
The timing for these is really up to you since it depends on how much you use your computer. For a heavy user like me who can spend eight hours a day at work and then an hour or two several times a week at home, I run them every week or so. If you only go online once a day to check email and Facebook for an hour, once a month or so is fine. Longer will not hurt you and the more often you run them the quicker they work. Defragging takes the longest so if you have never defragged before it could take overnight or more depending on the size of your hard drive.
One word of warning about defragging. If you have a SSD drive and not a regular "platter" drive you should not run defrag. It will not kill it; however, I have read reports that they will not last as long if you do.
Maintenance other than those mentioned above is as follows: Make sure you run your antivirus software regularly. If you have a free one, as I told you about last week, you may have to do it manually. To do so you usually right click on the software’s icon in your notification area and click update. Applications can vary so check yours and proceed.
The other two applications I have talked about before but are quite important are, "Malwarebytes" (malwarebytes.org) 
and "FileHippo App Manager" (filehippo.com/download_app_manager). I have talked about them in detail before but I do not feel like mentioning them again is too much. The new improved version of FileHippo is even better and easier to use.
See you next week.
