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" You take your car in for an oil change every 3000 miles, have its tires rotated and get the engine tuned up from time to time. Yet while we all make sure to maintain our vehicles, most of us don&amp;#039;t bother to perform similar tasks on our personal computers, even though we may spend more time in front of our PCs than we do in our cars. No, you don&amp;#039;t have to take your PC into a professional for regular service. All you need to do is perform a few routine maintenance tasks to keep it running in top form. HARDWARE MAINTENANCE Get the dust out. While dust on the outside of your PC&amp;#039;s case might look ugly, it&amp;#039;s the dust that gets inside, blocking airflow through the case, that&amp;#039;s the real problem. To clean out the interior of your PC, make sure the power is off, then remove the side or top panel (depending on your model) and use a can of compressed air to blow any dust bunnies out of the case. You should pay particular attention to the fins in the processor&amp;#039;s heat sink (the cooling device mounted to the CPU). If too much dust gets trapped in there, your processor will overheat, reducing its performance, stability and overall life span. You can determine if your CPU&amp;#039;s heat sink is becoming choked with dust by checking the temperature of the processor with a free utility like Hardware sensors monitor (www.hmonitor.com), Intel Active Monitor (www.intel.com/design/motherbd/active.htm) or SpeedFan (www.almico.com/speedfan.php). While you have the case open, also check the memory sockets, as well as the expansion slots where the graphics accelerator and other cards are plugged in. Dust can work its way into those electrical connections and cause the components to fail. Add or replace filters on your case fans. Most cases are equipped with both intake and exhaust fans to keep the case&amp;#039;s interior cool. By drawing air into the front of the case, though, an intake fan will also pull in dust. Unfortunately, very few PCs have filters on the intake fan to keep dust out, but you can make a filter of your own using--of all things--pantyhose. Just stretch a swath of pantyhose over your front intake fan, secure it with a few drops of Krazy Glue and then cut it to fit. Check the filter once a month and replace it when it becomes full of dust. You can tell when a filter is becoming clogged by monitoring your motherboard for overheating using the temperature utilities mentioned above. Rechargeable laptop batteries have come a long way, but even the most advanced lithium-ion batteries will lose capacity over time. The best way to ensure the maximum life span of a battery is to condition it. Users should fully charge a new battery, discharge it completely and recharge it to 100 percent again. After that, you don&amp;#039;t need to deplete the battery before charging it again, but you should always make sure to charge the laptop to 100 percent before unplugging it.  SOFTWARE MAINTENANCE Run Windows&amp;#039; built-in hard-drive maintenance tools. Windows includes three very handy utilities for tuning up your hard drive, all of which you can access by opening My Computer, right clicking on the C: drive, and selecting Properties from the pop-up menu. We recommend you run each of these tools at least once a month. The first of these utilities is Disk Cleanup, which removes unneeded temporary files that consume dozens or even hundreds of megabytes of storage. The second tool is Windows XP&amp;#039;s Disk Check, which is accessible from the Tools tab under Error-checking. This utility scans your hard drive for disk errors and corrupt files and automatically repairs any problems it finds. The third utility is the Disk Defragmenter, available from the Tools tab under Defragmentation. Since Windows automatically places new files in the space that previously deleted files had occupied on your drive, large files are spread out in pieces across your drive. Disk Defragmenter repositions your files on the drive so that they&amp;#039;re stored contiguously, improving performance. Run antivirus and antispyware sweeps. Viruses and worms can cause devastating data loss, and spyware can give hackers access to the data on your PC. You need good antivirus, antispyware and firewall utilities for monitoring, diagnosis and repairs. Free antivirus utilities, such as Grisoft AVG (free.grisoft.com) and Alwil avast (www.avast.com), keep threats like viruses and worms away, while antispyware tools, like Microsoft&amp;#039;s AntiSpyware (www.microsoft.com/downloads), Lavasoft&amp;#039;s Ad-Aware (www.lavasoftusa.com) and PepiMK&amp;#039;s Spybot (safer-networking.org), will fend off spyware. Every once in a while, though, these utilities will allow something to slip through. That&amp;#039;s why it&amp;#039;s crucial for you to run an antivirus and antispyware sweep at least once a week. We advise that you double- or even triple-up on both your antivirus and antispyware protection in order to catch as many threats as possible. Also be sure to have a strong software firewall, like Zone Labs&amp;#039; ZoneAlarm (www.zonelabs.com), installed on your PC. This software acts as a barrier to prevent malicious data from getting into your system. Update your software. Your security tools can&amp;#039;t detect new threats if you don&amp;#039;t update them. Many of these utilities, such as Alwil avast, automatically update daily, but others, like Spybot, require manual updates that you should perform at least weekly. Likewise, your system should be kept as current as possible. Select Automatic Updates in the Control Panel of Windows XP and make sure that your PC is set to download critical operating system updates daily. If you&amp;#039;re having problems with any component--such as a video card--sometimes the manufacturer will have remedied the problem with a new device driver. Check your PC vendor&amp;#039;s Web site for updated drivers. Alternatively, you can look for the latest driver on the component manufacturer&amp;#039;s Web site. Check the driver version number on the site against the version installed on your PC by looking in the Device Manager (find it in the System menu under the Windows XP Control Panel). Occasionally, you should also check for new versions of your motherboard&amp;#039;s BIOS, or Basic Input/Output System, which is the part of your PC that tells all your hardware how to function. Your BIOS version is listed on the screen that appears just after you turn on your PC. If you don&amp;#039;t see this screen during boot-up, tap the tab key after you turn it on. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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