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Maintaining Your PC

Learn the most basic steps to keep your computer humming

All the wonderful hardware that you've spent your hard-earned money on doesn't mean a thing if the software driving it goes flooey. If any programs cause your system to crash (meaning it freezes up and you have to take drastic measures to revive it), you can try a variety of tasks to fix it. You can also keep your system in good shape to help you avoid those crashes. In this article, you learn how to:

Shut down a crashed program.
Restart in Safe Mode if your PC isn’t responding to your clicks and typing.
Clean up your system to delete unused files.
Free up disk space.
Use Internet Explorer to remote temporary Internet files.

Shut Down a Nonresponsive Application

1. If your computer freezes and won't let you proceed with what you were doing, press Ctrl+Alt+Del.

2. In the Windows screen that appears, click Start Task Manager.

3. In the resulting Windows Task Manager dialog box, click the Applications tab and select the application that you were in when your system stopped responding.

- Michel Tcherevkoff

4. Click the End Task button.

5. In the resulting dialog box, the Windows Task Manager tells you that the application isn’t responding and asks whether you want to shut it down now. Click Yes.

Tip

If pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del doesn't bring up the Task Manager, you're in bigger trouble than you thought.

You might need to press and hold your computer's power button to shut down. Note that some applications use an AutoSave feature that keeps an interim version of the document that you were working in — you might be able to save some of your work by opening that last-saved version.

Other programs don’t have such a safety net, and you simply lose whatever changes you made to your document since the last time you saved it.

The moral? Save, and save often.