12 easy PC tasks you should be doing (but aren't)

 

Photograph by Robert Cardin

 

PCWorld - Computers may have become a lot more user-friendly over the past decade, but they’re still far from perfect—PCs require a certain amount of configuration and maintenance to operate at their full potential. Unfortunately, because we humans are also far from perfect, we frequently don’t put in the work we should, and we end up with a slower, sloppier, less secure machine as a result.
No more excuses! Whipping your PC into the best shape it can be requires but a dozen simple tasks. None are complicated, most take a matter of minutes, and all will have a major effect on how well your computer works for you. Even better, by the time you’re finished you’ll never have to worry about doing many of these tasks again.

Clean the case, keys, and display

The first task is the most basic: Are you keeping your computer clean? It’s not just important because a dirty PC looks gross, or is less pleasant to use. Simply put, a clean computer can last longer. Dirt and dust buildup in and around your computer can clog the fans and air intakes, causing your hardware to run hotter, which lowers its expected life span. So if your PC is looking a little musty, take the time to clean it.


To do so, you need to have only a few things on hand: a Phillips-head screwdriver, a can of compressed air, paper towels, and rubbing alcohol.

Once you’re ready to begin, shut down your computer, unplug it, and move it somewhere with a little open space in which to maneuver. Look on the back panel, and find the screws that hold the case’s side panels in place. Unscrew them—making sure to put them someplace safe—and remove the side panels, usually by sliding them backward and then pulling them away. If you haven’t cleaned the computer in a long time, you should immediately see some areas where dust has collected.

You’re likely to find the most dust bunnies on the fans inside the computer and on the vents outside. You can remove a lot of dust simply by wiping the fans gently with a paper towel, and by using a lightly dampened paper towel on the vents. Once you’ve wiped away any piled-up dust, use the can of compressed air to blow the dust out of the inside of any heat sinks, such as the one attached to the CPU or the graphics card. Use the air to clean out remaining dust from the system’s various fans too, but be careful: A sustained blast of air can overspin the fan, damaging it. Either use short bursts of air or hold the fan with your finger to prevent it from spinning. Afterward, clean out any other dust you see inside the case.

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Looking to maximize your PC's performance or troubleshoot a problem?

How to Benchmark Your PC

Looking to maximize your PC's performance or troubleshoot a problem? First, you'll need to master the art of benchmarking.

Whenever you read a PC review or a component review, benchmark results typically accompany it. Such results are most often in the form of numbers, such as a score or a frames-per-second total. Sometimes they're relative, in that the result is posted as a multiple of some reference system or number.

Because benchmark scores mostly appear in product reviews, that's how people frequently view them--simply as a way of comparing products. But benchmarking is useful for more than just figuring out what graphics card to buy.

• Benchmark software can help to stress-test new systems (particularly important for PCs you assemble yourself).
• Benchmarks can test for sudden performance issues. If your system has apparently slowed down in some way, you can use before-and-after benchmarks to confirm your suspicions.
• You can run some benchmarks to check whether certain tweaks you've implemented on a system actually speed things up or not.

There's more to benchmarking than simply installing the benchmark software, firing it up, and running it at whatever default settings exist. I'll walk through the reasons you may want to benchmark in more detail, and then I'll discuss how to properly run a benchmark.
Before diving into the whys and wherefores of benchmarking, let's start with my Golden Rule.

Loyd's Golden Rule of Benchmarking

It's a simple rule, and it applies to most users who aren't professional product reviewers: Run benchmarks that give you information about what you want to do with your PC. Anything else is irrelevant.

 

If you want to see how well your system does with games, run game benchmarks.If you're primarily a PC game player, you probably care about how well games run on your system. Secondarily, you might care about 3DMark scores. In contrast, a Cinebench score or a Photoshop-filter performance test won't be as important to you.

 

Cinebench should tell you how well your system runs Maxon's Cinema 4D.Of course, most people use PCs for more than one purpose. Even so, you probably use your PC for one purpose more than you do for others, so it's worthwhile to focus on how well your system performs in that arena.

By the way, there is a corollary to Loyd's Rule: If your PC runs games very well, it will run just about anything well.

You'll find some narrow exceptions to that rule. For example, if you want to use an architectural CAD application, a system that runs games smoothly will likely do fairly well with that CAD app--but it would probably perform even better with a professional graphics card. At the same time, if you use a pro graphics card, game performance will likely decrease a bit.       More