The number of maintenance tasks involved with laptops and desktops has dropped considerably over the years. Growing up, I remember having to deal with nonsense like IRQ settings and memory managers just to get some DOS games to work. As late as the 2010s, weekly defrags were almost mandatory for keeping a Mac or Windows machine running at top speed.

Improvements in both hardware and software have reduced busy work, to the point that it can be easy to treat a laptop like a glorified smartphone. In reality, though, PCs are still more complex, with plenty of tricky maintenance aspects. Many of these mistakes are understandable, mind. Don’t feel like an idiot if you’re making them — I know I’ve committed one or two in the past.

Cleaning your screen

Once upon a time, it might’ve been safe to clean your monitor the same way you clean your living room window, but if so, those days are long gone. Spraying a conventional glass cleaner like Windex is not only going to leave streaks, but damage the protective and/or anti-glare coatings modern PC makers use. Sufficient amounts may result in permanently discolored patches with no way of fixing them.

The ideal cleaning solution is about 70% isopropyl alcohol. Spray this onto a microfiber cloth — doing this minimizes the chances of leaving lint or threads behind, as well as the risk of liquids seeping in behind the bezel. Next, wipe thoroughly, but using as little pressure as possible. While pressing hard might get stubborn marks off, it could also damage pixels. PC screens aren’t completely fragile, but most of them aren’t equipped with something as durable as the Gorilla Glass on your phone.

You can mix your own cleaning spray if you can’t find something branded for computers. As for how often to clean, that’s largely up to you, although it’s best to reserve that for when you see dust or smudges you can’t ignore. This will preserve your screen’s coating for as long as possible.

Optimizing hard drives

An important warning about defrags

If you’re not a teenager, you’re probably familiar with those regular defrag schedules I talked about in my intro. With platter-based hard drives (HDDs), defrags are essential. As an HDD writes and re-writes, it gradually scatters data across different sectors, forcing the drive to spin more to read anything. Defrags reorganize that data in a way that’s more efficient, such that there can be a very noticeable speed boost in some cases.

Outside of long-term or large-scale storage, however, HDD’s have been replaced by solid-state drives (SSDs). These use flash chips instead of platters, resulting in much faster read times, no matter how data is organized. Differences in seek time on an SSD are so tiny as to be meaningless. There’s no point in defragging one. Worse, defragging an SSD is actively harmful — all SSDs have a limited number of write cycles, and you’ll burn through a lot of them during a single defrag operation.

What SSDs do need is something known as TRIM optimization. When you delete a file on an SSD, that space doesn’t immediately become available again. Trimming allows data blocks to be flagged and readied for re-use, preventing slowdowns caused by a drive having to erase and rewrite blocks at the same time in the middle of normal use.

The good news is that Windows and macOS have been trimming SSDs automatically for years, so you probably don’t need to do anything — Windows 11, for example, defaults to once per week during expected downtime. You may want to consider manually trimming external SSDs, but some may not even be formatted in a compatible filesystem, and temporary slowdowns are more acceptable if you’re just stashing movies, music, and documents instead of apps.

Blowing dust out of (or off of) your case

Frequency might be the real problem

Dust is a silent killer of PCs. It might seem like a cosmetic problem at first, but if dust gathers on vents and internal components, it can trap enough heat to raise internal temperatures. That, in turn, raises the risk of component failure, particularly in gaming or professional graphics/video systems, which are regularly pushing their CPUs and GPUs as hard as possible. You simply can’t afford a dusty PC if you want to overclock.

When it comes to external dust, simply wiping vents with a dry microfiber cloth or paper towel will probably do. It’s when you need to clean the inside of a tower PC that things get complicated. You need to not only turn off the tower, but unplug it, and ground yourself by holding onto to the case or using an anti-static wristband. An anti-static mat might be useful if you have one.

Once you’ve got your tower open, you can use an electric duster or compressed air can to clean off components. Avoid using any kind of vacuum, owing to the threat of static. If you do use an air can, be sure to hold it upright and a few inches away from components to avoid spraying any liquid. Fire air in short, controlled bursts.

The way most people get this wrong isn’t so much in how they do it as how frequently. You shouldn’t wait until you happen to notice dust and find it disgusting. Instead, it’s best to wipe off external dust at least once per month, and do a thorough tower cleaning a few times per year. You may need to clean more often than this depending on the condition of the room your machine normally sits in. Don’t worry about cleaning the insides of laptops — modern designs make this difficult, and their internal ventilation systems are usually adequate to prevent issues.

Backing up important data

Be ready for the absolute worst

If your demands aren’t that big, it’s possible for backup to be trivial and automatic. Cloud lockers like Google Drive, iCloud Drive, and OneDrive are baked into most devices, and you can rely exclusively on streaming services for music and video. If your laptop falls off a building, all you might need to do is re-download your apps and sign back into accounts when you buy a replacement.

If data is truly important, though, it should always be saved in at least three locations: the cloud, your internal hard drive, and an external backup drive. Drives can fail, and if a disaster strikes, you may need a copy you can grab while rushing out the door. Heck, even cloud servers can run into problems, and it’s never wise to be completely dependent on a service that expects you to pay every month until you switch or die.

Based on your needs, you might consider saving files to multiple cloud services, or ones that can restore an entire computer, such as Backblaze. You might even save data to multiple external drives, stashing one of them off-site or in a fireproof safe. That last option might be a bit extreme, but not so much if you’re relying on it for your livelihood.