PC Software Maintenance – is it Still Necessary?

Given that there has been a dramatic reduction in the incidence of news about viruses and worms, is it still necessary to perform all that maintenance on your PC Software.  This is a question that we are getting quite frequently these days.  The easy answer is a definite ‘Yes’.   Most software and website industries are continuing to evolve quite rapidly – even right through the recession.   Accordingly, these more complex applications require much more maintenance and they are increasingly complex to restore in case of disaster or loss of data.   This is much more than just re-installing the application system itself, it gets into the master application files and their status at the time of any problem. 

Without realizing it, the entire PC industry is much more vulnerable – on a user by user basis – to total loss of PC capability than ever before.  In the past if your PC was lost or stolen it was a simple process to locate the CDs and reinstall the applications.  Now, with greater complexity in all our PC usage, just getting down on paper the sum total of all that was lost is a real challenge.  Many people simply do not have an accurate picture of all the websites and programs that they use on a regular basis.  Some do not even keep an organized login and password diary.

Therefore, PC software maintenance is as important as ever – perhaps more so.   Beginning with applications you can work your way toward the OS itself.   Most people do not regularly assess their key applications and delete the unnecessary and redundant or prior-version files they no longer need.  Then the cleaned data files should themselves be backed up.  Just this part of software maintenance is more challenging than ever before.  

Next is the website and login data that should be reviewed and cleaned, after which those records should be recorded for security.  All the support and utilities and secondary applications need to be saved and backed up as well.  Finally, your browser and all your temp files need to be cleaned and saved and your cache emptied.

Virus protection software along with your spyware and malware protection systems should be run and saved regularly.   This is not adequately served by simply allowing these applications to auto-run as many of them are set up to do.   You should initiate maintenance runs of these programs at least monthly.

Lastly, the Operating System needs to be maintained and backed up weekly.   You should regularly perform maintenance on your Windows System Registry.   This is critical so as to provide for a faster-running and more efficient system.  That file should be backed up as well.  You can purchase and download a top registry software package that does this.  They also perform the other registry fix functions that accomplish any needed Registry Repair.

This review will, hopefully, validate that the need for PC Software Maintenance is still on the critical list.