What things should I run daily, weekly, monthly on my Windows machine?
What things should I run daily, weekly, monthly on my Windows XP machine?
- De fragmentation
- Scan-disk
- Full system scan
- Disk clean up
- Trojan checker
- malware remover
or any other thing...
And should I run all these things in Safe-mode always?
I want to perform all mentioned things automatically at night. How to set schedule and What would be the best plan? For daily weekly and monthly?
I've 300 GB SATA HDD with 6 partition.
I would like to know in above mentioned list:
Which process should I run daily?
Which process should I run weekly?
Which process should I run on monthly basis
How to set schedule for all in Windows task scheduler?
Solution 1:
There are plenty of useful, housekeeping task that you could do with doing periodically... most people know to virus-check periodically, and even to check for Windows updates (though they might not be entirely fastidious about it).
Billdehaan and Harrymc have covered most bases... but my pet moan is about backups - even the people who should know better fail to adequately protect themselves.
These days we have all sorts of valuable information on our computers, and not only should they be secured, they should also be backed-up securely - and ideally in more than one place. We have financial details, important email correspondence (e.g. receipts for online purchases), photographs (wedding & baby pics can't always be replaced), DRM-crippled music, films and games... lots of things.
It's up to you decide how much valuable stuff you have, and how secure you need it to be, but I'd recommend some of the following:
- firstly, a decent, flexible backup program that can securely create & schedule backups
- an additional internal drive for holding backups
- an external HDD or NAS box for storing backups
- backing up to DVD and storing off-site (DVDs can't be trusted on their own, but are a useful additional protection)
- trading backups with trusted friends and relatives
Personally, I have an internal 1TB disk for backups, 2 separate 500GB NAS boxes and I swap stuff with a relative with an external hard disk. I use Acronis True Image Home, which I'd recommend (but there are other cheap and free alternatives), and it emails me after each attempt to confirm success.
This whole package might sound like overkill, but my regime has saved me on a number of occasions - you can adapt to fit your needs. A single disk failure is extremely common; you are less likely to lose multiple disks at the same time, but theft is always a small risk.
Final two tips:
Make sure the most important things are backed up in at least two places
Make sure you sample the most important backups periodically - just because they backed-up successfully doesn't mean that they will maintain their integrity forever...
Solution 2:
Since you're talking about running these events overnight, the short answer is that you can run all of them. Doing redundant defragmentation won't hurt your machine. It may waste time, but if you're running it overnight, it won't matter.
The most important thing, of course, is backup. Preferably to an external device or network share, if possible. Your data is the most important thing; everything else can be rebuilt if necessary.
What I find is the best to handle syncronization of these tasks is to run a single task overnight. That task is a batch job, which runs each of the other tasks in sequence. That way, you don't get a disk cleanup starting while the backup is still running, etc.
or any other thing...
Overnight jobs are a great time to
- sync your system clock
- compress redundant/obsolete logs
- rebuild any tools that have large indexes
- run chkdsk on large drives
And should i run all these things in Safe-mode always?
There's no need to do that, unless a particular application you're running explicitly requires it.
I want to perform all mentioned things automatically in night. How to set schedule and What would be the best plan. for daily weekly and monthly?
In XP, there's a cron daemon (to use the Unix term) already built in. It's called "Scheduled Tasks".
To set up a cron job/scheduled task called "Overnight", do the following:
Control Panel->Scheduled Tasks->File->New->Scheduled Task
Select the "New Task"->Properties, and enter:
[Task Tab] (Run) C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe /C C:\Overnight.bat (Start in) C:\
[Schedule Tab] Select daily, 4:00 AM, every 1 days
And click . You'll have to enter your password for the task to be loaded. Now, the Overnight.bat batch file will run at 4 in the morning every day.
Within the batch file, you can call all the utilities that you want, in succession. There's all sorts of ways to check the day and date, so if you only want to run a defrag on Mondays, you can do that.
In my overnight script, for example, I do a complete image backup of my C: drive (using DriveXML) every Monday. If it's not Monday, I just do an incremental backup of C: to another disk. I do a full defrag of certain disks on certain days, not all at once. Of course, I'm sitting on 6TB of data, so I have to compartmentalize it a bit more than you will, otherwise my 4am job would still be running a 8am when I wake up.