For the past 10 years or so, I’ve been relentless in my computer maintenance schedule. I have a monthly checklist I follow that keeps whatever my machine I am working with, to work with screaming efficiency. First of all, I use a Toshiba laptop I purchased about a year ago running Windows XP MCE, which has 1024 MB D RAM and  a 100 Gig hard drive.

Here’s Bobbin’s  monthly computer maintenance schedule:

1) Run “Disk Cleanup”- which removes temp files and empties recycle bin, etc.
2) I move my Pro Tools Audio Recording Files to an external hard drive, and archive twice monthly. Each occasion,  I move anywhere between 3-4 gigs, freeing up my hard drive space.
3) Scan for viruses, malware, spyware (which always happens and updates itself in the background), but I ike to run a scan a view event logs.
4) Run “Check Disk”
4) 5) Clean my wireless mouse- take it apart and clean with alcohol.  I also wipe the mousepad with alcohol.
6) I clean the keyboards by inverting  and using canned air to remove dust and particulate matter.
7) Defragment
8) Clean the monitor screens with anti -static spray.
9) Remove dust from enitre workstation area surfaces.


I’ve recently come across some fantastic articles on optimizing Windows XP:
These are some tweaks for XP to help the overall audio performance to save CPU usage for audio computations. Hope this is helpful.


http://www.windowsdevcenter.com/pub/a/windows/2005/05/17/xp_tuning.html

http://www.windowsdevcenter.com/pub/a/windows/2004/04/27/pagefile.html

http://www.windowsnetworking.com/articles_tutorials/Gaining-Speed-Empty-Prefetch-XP.html

http://www.musicxp.net/index.php


Thanks to Jon Morse, and fellow vo-bb inmates for alerting me to the helpful links information.