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By James Ricketts | December 2009
It may come as a shock to you, but computer users in the U.S. alone spend over
$60 billion on solving computer errors. This amount does not include the
millions of hours that are lost due to computer downtime caused by these errors.
A lot of this money and time could be easily saved if we all became a little
more alert about maintaining the health of our computers.
It does not take a lot of time and effort to take care of your computer. In
fact, a few minutes spent on maintaining the health of your PC is a fraction of
the time it will take to solve computer errors. All you need to do in order to
keep your PC in perfect health is some basic understanding of computer problems,
a few reliable tools and some good computing practices. Let’s take a closer look
at these tasks.
Keep your Software Up-To-Date
Most of the software on your computer, starting from the operating system,
Microsoft and third-party applications, and device drivers, comprise complex
program codes that make them perform specific tasks. Although these software
products are usually thoroughly tested, there are always some bugs that get left
behind. These bugs may not only generate errors, such as the missing
msvcrt.dll
error, but they can also be exploited by various security threats to gain access
to your PC and cause problems. To combat these issues, software manufacturers
release regular updates to patch up bugs detected in their products. Failure to
install these updates may make your PC vulnerable and prone to malware
infections. You can use utilities, such as the Windows Automatic Update feature,
the update option in third-party programs, and a reliable third-party driver
update tool to download and install software updates on your computer.
Keep your PC Malware-Free
This is one of the most essential tasks to keep your PC free from problems. With
millions of viruses, Trojans, worms, spyware and adware lurking around the
Internet, it becomes our responsibility to protect our computers from them. Some
of the tools that can help you in protecting your PC against these security
threats are, firewall, antivirus, antispam, and antispyware. You must keep these
tools up-to-date with the latest definitions to make sure that they are ready to
combat the latest threats.
Ensure that you Have The Required Software to Perform a Particular Task
Certain errors, such as a DLL error
or runtime error may occur if the software required to perform a particular task
is not present on your computer. For instance, the
xvidcore.dll
error may occur when you do not have the XviD media file and you do not have the
XviD codec installed on the system.
Keep your Registry Free from Errors
One of the essential Windows components, the Windows registry works in the
background and controls how different software and hardware components work on
your computer. The registry does this because all configuration information of
your computer is stored within it. Problems within the registry arise when along
with the required information a lot of junk information fills it up. This
usually happens when data no longer required fails to get removed. This digital
junk causes the registry to bloat up, become unstable, and become prone to
damage and fragmentation. To fix these problems, it is best that you use an
efficient registry tool. These tools are designed to thoroughly scan, clean, and
defrag the registry to free it from all its problems. Once cleaned, the registry
not only becomes compact, but also gets optimized to work at its best
performance.
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