Maintence

  • Thread starter Thread starter Susan
  • Start date Start date
S

Susan

I have a ? about maintence, What are the steps to follow?
Defrag,disk scan, error checking. Which one comes 1,2,and
3? Ane when i go to use error checking it tells me to
restart. is this right? iI used the steps that are in the
Learn XP for maintence and it does not say that you have
to restart to do the error check
 
The check now button, will run an error check on all but the windows xp disk
with the system up and running, but to run it on the windows xp partition,
it needs exclusive use of the disk, so it runs it as the system is booting
up,

By default the disks are checked at boot to see if they have an error flag
set, if so, chkdsk will run automatically.

Don't forget to tick the boxes to get it to fix any errors it finds.

I'd say a sensible order would be

1. Backup anything you cant afford to lose.
2. Run disk cleanup.
3. Run error check (chkdsk)
4. Run defrag.
5. Do another backup

Paul
 
Hi, Susan,

There is an old saying - "If it aint broke, don't fix it!"

You can do a Disk Cleanup and Defrag once in a while if your machine shows
signs of slowing down.
If you are not having problems, don't worry about it.
 
I use the Windows Task Scheduler to run Defrag and Disk Cleanup every night
while I'm sleeping. I also do a scheduled scan everynight with my
anti-virus software. I run the check disk about once every two weeks. (The
scan disk won't work for me because I don't have a regular XP disk, which I
would need to fix any broken files scan disk found. Anyway, I would ony run
that if I had some serious problem.)

I do a backup of all My Documents and my emails and my Outlook files
everyday onto a CD. I also backup a very important file after each session
of using it, which is a pain in the butt, but it would be a MUCH bigger pain
if the file got lost.

If you do the maintainence on a regular basis, then the order you do it in
doesn't really matter. Bu sure to back up your stuff very often, though!
 
Back
Top