· virus protection — By maintaining a stable virus protection schedule, you are ensuring that the performance of your system is not being affected by any unecessary infected applications which could case later damage to installed programmes or important files.
· clean-up tools — Defragmenting the hard drive is an important tool used to keep your system "clean" by deleting any unused files which are no longer needed such as tempory internet files. The defragmentation tool also indexes the files which are needed so they can be accessed alot quicker, for example if you installed a game and then uninstalled it you would be left with free memory in which the programme used to be stored, this space is now affecting the systems performance, as it is making the index larger than it needs to be, therefore by defragmenting the system it pulls all of the data together in a logical and more accesible form.
· install and run a firewall - By installing and using a firewall at all times, decreases the risk of downloading infected files (dramtically) such as trojans, which are very common. By using your firewall you are maintaining the performance on your pc greatly because you are preventing unecessary interuptions and damage from viruses, spyware and adware.
· back-up to CD using compression software - maintaining a regular backup schedule will prevent loss of important user data. This will help the performance of your system because if need be you can restore your pc with all of your existing data to a safe point. This could be used in severe virus cases, in which you are unable to remove a virus.
