12 Days to a Healthy PC is designed to help you quickly make your computer faster, more responsive and healthier. We have listed steps beginning with Day 1 in order of importance. The view them all, begin here.
Day 3
Run a Thorough Scan of your Hard Drive
Your version of Windows comes with a few basic utilities that can help you run diagnostics on your system, We will be looking at scandisk and chkdsk today. If you have Windows 2000 and XP you will use a utility called chkdsk to search your drive for file errors and scan your hard disk's surface for physical defects. Previous version of Windows will use scandisk.
In XP, open My Computer and right-click the C: drive. Click Properties and then the Tools tab. Under Error Checking, click the Check Now button and then tick both boxes for Automatically Fix Errors and Scan For Bad Sectors. You will likely need to reboot.
Hint: Do this before bed as scanning the hard drive may take a few hours.
In 9.x versions of Windows, you will use the scandisk utility. Go to Start, Programs, Accessories, then System Tools. Select Scandisk and choose to automatically fix errors and to Perform a Thorough Scan.
What does this do?
Scanning the disk will help make sure the directories are in order, but more importantly, the scan will enable Windows to mark bad sectors on the disk and not write to those bad areas. This will improve system stability and prevent corruption of data.
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