Basic things to do

The_Minister wrote: »

My laptop and home pc have slowed down alot lately, and I have to admit, no-one in the family knows anything about maintenance, even though I know that there are files that you are meant to run every once in a while.
What would be the basic steps that we should take? What do they do?
For instance, I run disk defrag every now and again, but I don't know what all the squares mean (I read the key, I just don't understand the implications)

The squares are the smallest building blocks making up your hard drive. And all the files and programs on your computer are comprised of these squares. But sometimes there won't be a large enough set of standalone squares for a new file / program to be written to - so they'll get written to multiple disjointed sets. This makes it slow for your computer to read these files / programs as it has to travel all over your hard drive to read from these related disjointed sets of squares i.e. fragmented files in red.

Defragging is the computers way of reorganizing all the files into a consistent, contiguous set of squares each and hopefully the end result should be a faster performance.

Also, I have a tool called CCleaner running automatically upon startup - it cleans away lots of unneccessary temp files and general rubbish - highly recommended!