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or hardware or make changes to existing applications or hardware. As a result, the Registry tends to be clogged with entries that are no longer valid. These usually don’t cause any problems directly, but they can slow down your system. Interestingly, Microsoft does not provide a utility to clean up the Registry. To clean your Registry, you need to turn to a third-party utility. Quite a few Registry cleaner programs are out there, but my favorite is the freeware CCleaner by Piriform. You can download the latest copy at www.ccleaner.com.

Before you start cleaning your Registry with wild abandon, keep in mind that all Registry cleaners are risky in that it may delete something you want in the Registry. Because Microsoft makes changes to the Registry for every version of Windows, make sure your utility supports the Windows version you’re running. This is especially true for any 64-bit version of Windows! I’ve used CCleaner for a while and it has worked well for me—your experience may differ.

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NOTE CCleaner also helps clean all of the most common Web browsers and a number of popular applications.

Security: Spyware/Antivirus/Firewall

You simply cannot run a computer today without a large number of security programs to protect you from malicious attacks from spyware, malware, viruses, and hacking. In fact, the installation, monitoring, and updating of these programs (and possibly even hardware) is so important that they get their own chapter. Head to Chapter 26, “Securing Computers,” for a complete discussion of how to keep your computer safe!

Error-Checking and Disk Defragmentation

Keeping drives healthy and happy is a key task for every tech. Error-checking and Disk Defragmenter, discussed way back in Chapter 12, “Implementing Hard Drives,” are the key Windows maintenance tools used to accomplish this task.

When you can’t find a software reason (and there are many possible ones) for a problem such as a system freezing on shutdown, the problem might be the actual physical hard drive. The tool to investigate that is Error-checking. You can perform Error-checking by using the CHKDSK command from a command line, from the Start | Run dialog box, or by using Start | Start Search. You can also access the tool through the GUI by opening My Computer or Computer, right-clicking on the drive you want to check, selecting Properties, and then clicking the Tools tab. Click Check Now to have Error-checking scan the drive for bad sectors, lost clusters, and similar problems, and repair them if possible.

Run the Disk Defragmenter (Figure 17-5) on a regular basis to keep your system from slowing down due to files being scattered in pieces on your hard drive. Before you click the Defragment button, click the Analyze button to have Windows analyze the disk and determine if defragmentation is actually necessary. If you use Vista/7, your system is defragged automatically.

Error-checking and Disk Defragmenter are such critical maintenance features that you really should have them run automatically. Take a moment to see how to schedule these and other critical jobs.

Figure 17-5 Vista Disk Defragmenter

Scheduling Maintenance

Maintenance only works properly when you do it at regular intervals. Depending on the version of Windows installed, you can schedule maintenance jobs to run automatically. The CompTIA exam objectives define three areas for you to consider for scheduled maintenance: Defragmentation, Scandisk/Check Disk, and Startup programs. For the most part, we use the Task Scheduler, although this depends on the task and the version of Windows.

Task Scheduler/Scheduled Tasks

Two versions of Task Scheduler are available: Windows 2000 and XP run Version 1.0, and Vista/7 run Version 2.0. Microsoft called it Scheduled Tasks in Windows 2000/XP, but reverted to Task Scheduler in Windows Vista. In both versions you can choose an executable program and define when you want that program to run. Figures 17.6 and 17.7 show Scheduled Tasks running a backup at a certain time of day.

Version 2.0 is much more powerful