I think a lot of not only computer companies, but business in general must love it when people say to them, “do you think we need to get you out for general maintenance” on something.

I am sure there are a lot of different machines, devices and systems out there which do need constant maintenance, but generally speaking, most computers unless there is something wrong with them, do a very good job of looking after themselves.

There seems to be a level of intelligence now with computer when customers know something is wrong. They are not quite sure what, but something doesn’t seem right and more times than not they are correct.

There are software packages and certain types of setups, but more of the time your computer does not need maintenance unless you suspect something is wrong.

The purpose of this post is to put to rest a few misconceptions about computer maintenance.

Defragging

Defragging was once a very necessary and very good way of keeping your computer running fast. But its not anymore.

As your hard drive spins like a record player, your computer reads and writes information to it. Because the hard drive is spinning, the chunk of information your are writing (saving to your computers hard drive) is being saved to different areas of the hard drive.

This meant when you wanted to read the data (look at a picture for example) your computer had to retrieve a bit from here and a bit from there). This makes reading your data much slower than if it was all bundled together.

When you defragged your computer, your operating system would arrange the data that was related to all be stored closer together, making read times and computer using much faster.

But as technology gets better, so has computer hard drives. For the past 10 years computer hard drives are so much faster that it is no longer really necessary to defrag and have all your data on your hard drive together.

Modern day consumer hard drives spin at 72000 RPM, and the newer SSD’s (solid state drives) don’t spin at all.

It doesn’t matter (unless your hard drive is failing or extremely fragmented) where you data is you should always have decent speeds accessing it.

Hard Drive is slow because it is too full

This is only the case when your hard drive is about 99% full.

If your hard drive is not that full it doesn’t matter how many pictures or files your have on it, it will not decrease your speed and you will not have to do any maintenance related to having too many pictures.

There is no need to go on a cull.