The Norton Community recently posted a good blog on why you should clean up your computers. Here’s a brief summary on what you need to do and why it matters:
Why you need to:
- Outdated and unused software can be a vulnerability to cyber criminals
- Have a clear backup system will help you recover from hardware failures and viruses easily and efficiently
- Being aware of what’s supposed to be on your computer, will help you realize when there’s something you didn’t ask for
- These programs could be sucking up your resources (at best), or (at worst) doing malicious things
- Keeping programs and operating systems up to date helps to keep your computer secure from known threats
What to do:
- Clean up unused programs
- Go into your “control panel” –> “programs and features” and look over all the programs you have installed and delete programs you no longer need, or that you don’t think are supposed to be there.
- You can sort this by “Publisher” or “Installed On” to see what’s recently come through.
- Typically, anything that says “Toolbar” is a good idea to just delete. Just use the built-in toolbar from Chrom or Opera
- Look into your backup software ( if you don’t have one, check out ShadowProtect, they have good reviews and a decent pricepoint)
- Has it been running effectively?
- Is it working the way it should?
- Checkout your Anti-Virus/Anti-Malware
- If you’re a single user, Windows Defender (Free and built-in) should be just fine. If you’re an enterprise, you’ll want something more robust
- Is the AV/AM updating regularly?
- Has their been any threats detected?
- Check your Windows Updates
- Have they updated successfully?
- When was the last time you checked?
- Run your defragmentation
- Good idea if you feel your PC slowing, or you have used a lot of data. This won’t work if you have a solid-state drive, but those are super fast anyway and can’t get fragmented (or, technically, they are already fragmented but it doesn’t matter).