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Using Your Computer > Troubleshooting Computer Problems

Good housekeeping

By Lasa Information Systems Team

A computer hard drive can be likened, in part, to an office filing cabinet - it's where you store all your day-to-day work. And, like a filing cabinet drawer, it can become untidy and need an occasional clear out. Similarly, it won't tidy itself - so that's where this short guide to keeping your computer clean and tidy comes in.

Examples in this article are based on computers running Windows XP, but other operating systems have similar utilities.

Get familiar with your hard drive!

Maybe you've noticed that your machine's not running as quickly as it once was - or it's crashing or reporting errors. Windows has a number of handy utilities which make keeping your drive in tip-top condition easy.

Firstly, get used to examining the files on your machine using My Computer (by clicking the icon which is normally in the top left corner of your Windows desktop) or in your Start menu.If you open My Computer and click on the local drive (normally the C: drive - this is referred to as such throughout this document) you'll see a number of folders -  for example, Program Files, Documents and Settings, and Windows. These folders are a mixture of those installed when the computer was first set up and those you've created yourself like Word documents or Excel spreadsheets. A lot of them won't mean much to you and will have odd names and weird extensions like exe and dll. You might also find lots of files with .tmp extensions - more about these little nuisances later…

However, the golden rule is - if you don't know what a file is, don't delete it! It might be an important operating system file without which Windows won't run.

Document storage - be organised!

If you are working on a stand-alone PC or perhaps on a small peer-to-peer network, your user files (those you create with an application like Word, for example) are stored somewhere on your hard drive and, hopefully, backed up regularly to tape or CD.

Looking at your filing cabinet again, you wouldn't just chuck all your work into one drawer - you'd have dividers and folders. Think of your computer hard drive in the same way. To make life easier - and to make backing-up simpler - the ideal place to store them is under the My Documents folder. It's then easy to create new folders for different types of work which will make it easier to find, retrieve and manage your files. For example you'll maybe want a correspondence folder, a finance folder and so on. Then under correspondence you might want a sub folder for your 2003 letters, or maybe one for correspondence with specific organisations or people.

To create a new folder, open Windows Explorer, navigate your way to the My Documents folder and click on it. Then, click File > New > Folder and give it a name. To create a sub-folder, click on the folder under which you want to create the sub-folder and go through the same procedure as above.

How you organise folders and their contents is up to you, but you might want to talk to your colleagues about how they organise their files so as to have some organisational standards - indeed there may already be organisational policies in place.

You can have as many levels of folder as you want but don't get carried away as it will then become difficult to navigate around your folders and locate files.

If you are on a network with a file server where your documents are stored on a drive (or perhaps several different drives) then generally the above information is still relevant - but use the folder (or folders) where your network administrator has given you access to store your files instead of My Documents.

For more information see the knowledgebase article Moving from personal to organisational directory structures.

In a well-managed organisation the server will be backed up daily - but generally your computer's hard drive won't - so make sure you don't save anything vital on your machine!

Temporary files

While you are typing away at your letter, Windows is quietly working away in the background carrying out a number of tasks. One of these is the creation of temporary (or "temp") files - a kind-of back-up for the document you are currently working on. If all goes well, when you save the document, the temporary file is deleted automatically by Windows. If something goes wrong and Windows crashes or the application ends suddenly, these temporary files get left behind.

In addition when you run through the shut down routine Windows will clean up behind itself. Over time, these temporary files will build up - and Office 2000 has a nasty habit of creating temp files with very long names and leaving them to clutter up your hard drive. So, every now and then, run a search using Windows Explorer to find these files and safely delete them.

To do this, open Windows Explorer and click on the C: drive. Then open the search dialogue box (Tools > Find > Files and Folders or right click on the C: drive) and type *.tmp in the Named box and click Find Now. This will find any files with a .tmp extension as the * is a "wildcard" i.e. it will match on any characters. The search results will bring up a list of the tmp files on your system - many of them will be lurking in the C:Windowstemp folder - but it's worth checking the whole drive. Depending on how long since the drive was last cleaned up there could be any number of these files. You can then select them all (Edit > Select All) and hit the delete key to safely dispatch them to the recycle bin.

Scandisk

Many users only ever see the Scandisk utility when something has gone wrong. If you close Windows down incorrectly (i.e. just switch it off rather than selecting Shut Down), or it crashes, Scandisk automatically runs to check that the disk or the file structures haven't been damaged in any way. It is a good idea to run Scandisk occasionally anyway - it can be accessed through Start > Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Scandisk.

A Standard test will take a couple of minutes - a thorough test will take longer as it also checks the physical surface of the hard disk for any errors.

In Windows XP Scandisk will ask you to restart the computer in order to run the scan.Errors can be fixed automatically or you can decide what to do - if you're not sure take the recommended action.

If you try to run the test and it doesn't complete but keeps going back to the start you might need to stop an application such as an Antivirus program from running as it could be impeding the progress of the test. Alternatively you can run Windows in Safe Mode - see Defragmentation below to find out how to do this.

After you've run the test you will get a report on the status of the drive.

Check files

If you run a Scandisk test and it finds what it describes as "lost file fragments" and you select the option to save the files Windows will create check files which it will allocate with names such as file0001.chk, file0002.chk and so on. These will be stored under the root (C:) directory - and can be safely deleted at intervals. Run through the same procedure as for finding temp files but type *.chk instead.

Recycle Bin

Having purged your folders of .tmp and .chk files etc., it's time to empty your recycle bin. The recycle bin is a safety net so that if you delete a file one day and then suddenly wish you hadn't you can restore it from the bin. If you are happy that all the files in the bin are now unimportant, just right click on the recycle bin icon on the desktop and select Empty Recycle Bin. You'll be given a chance to change your mind, and then they're gone (but see below…)

Defragmentation

A fragmented hard disk has parts of files scattered across different locations.  This wastes space on yoru hard drive and means it takes longer for programmes to open files.  Defragmenting a disk puts all the parts of each file together in one location.  This reduces the time the computer spends locating files, effectively speeding the machine up.

It is worth defragmenting your machine every month or so - you might be surprised how much difference it makes.

The defragment utility can be found in the Accessories > System tools menu.

Select the C drive for defragging. By selecting the Show Details button you are shown a visual representation of what the utility is doing, moving your files around. As with Scandisk you might find that it won't complete its activity but keeps returning to the start - if this happens it's because an application running in the background is writing to the disk and interrupting the process. 

Defragmentation will only work correctly if you don't do anything on the computer at the same time as it is running - even then sometimes you will find the defragmenter keeps returning to 0%. To get around this, restart the PC in Safe Mode by repeatedly pressing the F8 key after the computer has gone through its initial checks, i.e. before the Windows logo appears. You should see a black screen with a number of choices - select Safe Mode. Once Windows has finished loading into Safe Mode, start the defragmentation utility as before.

Depending on the size of your hard drive, defragmentation can take quite a long time, sometimes hours, so don't start it when you've got an important piece of work to do! You can leave it running over night if you like.

You can safely stop defragmentation at any time by clicking the Stop button.

Really deleting files

In case of extreme emergency such as a serious virus attack or you've emptied your recycle bin with an important file in it, it's worth knowing that even though you've deleted a file and emptied your recycle bin the file stays on your hard drive until something else is written over the top of it (or you defragmented).

What Windows does when you empty your recycle bin, is to change the information in the VFAT (Virtual File Allocation Table, essentially a list of all the files on your hard drive) to indicate that the clusters on the disk where the files were stored are now available to be overwritten. This means that you can run file retrieval software, such as VCOM System Suite to rescue some of the files which might have been deleted by the virus. Similar techniques are used by computer forensics experts investigating fraud and computer crime gather information from seized PCs. 

However, be aware that installing such software on your computer after losing data may well write over the top of what you lost.  If you have an adequate backup plan you should never need to use this software, but if you do think it would be useful, you should install it before you have a problem! 

Recovery software should not be considered a replacement for a sturdy backup plan.

Backup files

With an office application such as Word 2000 you can, through the Options menu, allow Word to create back up files. This provides you with a way of automatically having a back up of a file - but takes up a considerable amount of room on your drive. They are given the same name as the main file but a different extension. It is worth searching for and deleting old files like these every now and then. Run a search as before for *.wbk (or .bak if you are using Word 97 or earlier) and delete those which you don't want. Excel 2000 back files are given a .xlk extension.

Disk Clean Up

Another way of deleting temp files, and also temporary Internet files, off-line web pages and emptying the recycle bin is to use the disk clean up utility. This again can be found in the Accessories > System tools folder. By running the utility it will calculate how much space you can clear on your hard drive and lists them individually so that you can select which you want to delete. This is the safest way of clearing Internet files as it does not delete any files which might be necessary such as cookies. However, I have found that it is not completely rigorous in searching for temp files and the method described previously is more reliable. But the disk clean up is a good and quick way of clearing space.

Antivirus

Not really a disk utility but running Antivirus software regularly (and making sure that the virus definitions are kept up to date) is essential. See the Lasa Knowledgebase articles Infection Control and Dealing With Viruses for more information.

Housekeeping records

If you are looking after the PCs in your organisation you may find it helpful to use this downloadable Excel template to record your housekeeping. Thanks to the Women's Environmental Network for allowing the use of this document.