Laptop Care

Looking after a laptop requires both software and hardware preventative maintenance, and much like a car if it’s not cared for it will develop problems, which may eventually cause it fail or breakdown completely.

Laptop Care - Hardware
a) Ensure the laptop is always kept clean this means cleaning the screen, body and keyboard, in most cases a piece of strong warm water damped kitchen towel (only damp not wet enough to drip)

When wiping the laptop with your damp cloth ensure the laptop is powered off and disconnected from the mains, but if it’s still warm this will help to evaporate any leftover moisture.



b) Laptop care should also cover the battery, after all they are not cheap to replace and if looked after properly there is no reason why its longevity cannot be increased by a year or more.

The most important thing is to always plug the laptop into mains power whenever possible; the more frequently, and the more charge that is drained from the battery the shorter its life will be, read here for more on looking after a laptop battery.

c) Clean your CD/DVD drive, due to the design of many laptops air is drawn in and out of the laptop through all vents and openings (this includes the CD/DVD drive), with this is drawn dust and dirt particles which can settle on the DVD/CD drives read/write head.

Clean every 6 months or so with a standard DVD player cleaner before the build-up of dirt or dust causes read or write errors.

d) A lot of laptop care involves using parts of the laptop as less as possible, by this I mean, if you work on a laptop from home or in the office for long periods, get yourself an external keyboard and mouse.

As well as preventing too much wear and tear on the laptops keyboard and control pad it could also help to prevent conditions such as repetitive strain injury.

e) Overheating, check the laptops vents and make sure they are clear of fluff as this can inhibit the laptops cooling ability making it work harder to keep itself cool which then means it will actually run slower and hotter which could lead to reduced life of the laptop itself.

Laptop Care - Software
a) Fragmentation
Did you know every time you use your laptop your hard drive suffers from fragmentation and removing this is a big part of laptop care .

What is fragmentation?

Fragmentation occurs when a file is broken down and stored in more than one location, this means the heads on the hard drive need to visit multiple locations to load a file, do this a few times and it makes your computer slower to load files and applications, as fragmentation is progressive it needs to be done every month or so, read more on how to do this here..

Laptop Tips – If your laptop is lucky enough to have a SSD or solid state drive make sure you never defragment this as it could cause more harm than good.

b) Disk errors
Even the smallest disk errors can cause applications to crash or files to become corrupt, imagine what a major disk error could do, system crashes, data loss, a system that won’t boot.

Help to prevent such errors and run a periodical CHKDSK as part of your routine laptop care program

c) Viruses and other malware
This really does not need to much explaining, but did you know that no antivirus or antimalware software is 100% reliable.

As a backup it’s certainly having additional protection which can be run once a week as an extra safeguard, minimizing the risk even more of your computer getting infected. More articles on Viruses and other malware

d) Using power saving options
Power saving is there for one reason, to enable your computer to work longer while using battery power, this in-turn will increase the longevity of the battery itself

e) Disable unneeded hardware resources
Unneeded hardware resources all use a certain amount of power which will drain the laptops battery, features such as modem, PCMCIA or cardbus ports can all be disabled as they are very rarely used today, but can be re-enabled if needed.

f) Tune Windows for performance over aesthetics
Windows does look very pretty, but what’s the price we pay for all the eye candy?

The price is an extra load on the system, but changing the configuration towards performance might lose a little of the look, but generally this performance gains are well worth this, more laptop tips here

For more on laptop care help and tips

computer adviser laptop care article