PC Maintenance

[glorybound]

Do you guys do anything, other than the typical defrag, to maintain your PC's. I have tried everything, but to tell you the truth, I think most do more damage than good. My last utility was the WinZip System Utilities Suite, which seems to do good things, but it started to look spammy by all these "offers".

[Neilg]

nothing at all. AVG used to be good but even that now has constant pop ups and multiple processes kicking in at startup. ESET endpoint antivirus and spotify are the only things in my system tray.

[glorybound]

It seems like all these companies are grabbing at ways to monetize.

[Morbid Angel]

I rarely do anything to my workstation. If you work clean, no bogus software, just your tools you should be just fine. With this said though, I do run a smart ssd app to monitor ssd life / health.

Generally any issues I have are hardware related (due to age) of my system.

[glorybound]

What do you use to monitor you SSD?

I rarely do anything to my workstation. If you work clean, no bogus software, just your tools you should be just fine. With this said though, I do run a smart ssd app to monitor ssd life / health.

Generally any issues I have are hardware related (due to age) of my system.

[glorybound]

Mine is looking pretty strong.

[Morbid Angel]

SSD life pro.

[Morbid Angel]

I was told you have to let it run in the background for some weeks before you can trust its opinion.

[glorybound]

I'll have to purchase; I used the trial

[Vizioen]

Do you guys do anything, other than the typical defrag, to maintain your PC's. I have tried everything, but to tell you the truth, I think most do more damage than good. My last utility was the WinZip System Utilities Suite, which seems to do good things, but it started to look spammy by all these "offers".

I wouldn't recommend defraging an ssd by the way. There won't be any noticable change in speed with an ssd even though it's heavily used. But defragmentation of an ssd decreases its lifespan faster.

[glorybound]

I wouldn't recommend defraging an ssd by the way. There won't be any noticable change in speed with an ssd even though it's heavily used. But defragmentation of an ssd decreases its lifespan faster.

good to know. I just defraged, but won't do it again.

[Donald2B]

Yeah, no need to defrag an SSD. One can get decent performance defragging a traditional platter hdd, reducing the amount of movement the heads need to make while accessing the various bits of information.

[tricky]

A few months ago I decided to purchase and install the whole suite of AVG software on my laptop at home - an ageing Dell XPS machine. It ran through everything telling me what programs should be stopped to improve performance, which things could be improved etc. Also, when I plugged it into the power, it ran various things to make the machine run better, restoring a battery mode when I was disconnected from the mains.

It all looked quite clever, and I was quite happy.

however, a few months on and the system just seemed so slow. Just unplugging the mains cord resulted in delays where the AVG tried to improve performance for running on a battery. Pop ups started telling me to do this that and the other. Really annoying.

It got to a point where I uninstalled everything related to AVG.

Since then, everything is really good again!

[glorybound]

That seems to be their MO - At first they seem to do good, but in the long run they do more harm than good.

[beestee]

I backed a kickstarter called Jumpshot at the time that was later purchased by avast, it is now called grimefighter. It was pretty neat and worked well on most of the PCs that I tried it on. It would basically do it's sweep in one session without any residual effects. The one time that it did mess up, I was able to go right back into it and undo the changes it made.

Made quite a difference on one of my older laptops.