Controlling your PC means more than sitting at the keyboard or clicking the mouse. It also means following good usage operations and creating the right circumstances to allow your PC to run well while also protecting it from unneeded harm.

This article tackles one of the most standard areas where bad habits can result in human-created problems that could lead to disasters: startup/shutdown and making changes to your system.

Avoiding Redundant Restarts

Some of the greatest effort your total PC system undergoes happens when you hit the power button to turn it on. A close second happens again when you shut the system down.

Motors, fans, chips, drives, and so on must start, and they begin to warm as they do so because electrical energy is flowing to them after being converted by the power supply. As a result, there’s a fair amount of stress on the equipment—stress that is only exacerbated if you don’t operate the system as it was projected to be operated.

This stress can easily result in disk data recovery or power supply damage. Some hardware experts will tell you that every time you boot or reboot your system, you’re reducing its life expectancy (although the same could be said about celebrating birthdays). But whether that is entirely accurate or not, you’re certainly putting your computer chips and other parts through unnecessary stress if you create situations where you have to reboot frequently.

How Often You Need to Restart

If you’re someone who usually leaves your PC running all the time, you may be wondering how often you need to restart Windows.

Clearly, you need to restart it when the system is frozen or hung, or when a situation presents itself (such as installing a new application) that requires or could benefit from a refreshed desktop.

As a user of consumer Windows, you may find that you can go no more than a few days or a week without restarting Windows. This depends on the version you’re using (Windows XP gives me more time between needed restarts than earlier versions), your computer setup (how much memory and virtual memory you have, for example), and how you use your system. Users who rarely use their PCs for more than e-mail and light web browsing may go weeks before they notice the standard warning signs of a system needing a restart, which include the following:

- A growing sluggishness (windows and files opening more slowly) is noticeable throughout the system.

- The display gets slow to refresh and/or you notice an increasing distortion as you work, where pages appear to keep the “garbage” from previous screens.

- You begin receiving error messages and warnings that Windows is low on virtual memory or there is not enough memory.

Be aware that as Windows runs over the course of many hours and many days and as files and programs are opened and closed, you can end up with waning desktop resources. There are many reasons for this, including the fact that just because you close a program or a file does not mean that Windows automatically frees up the working overhead space used by that file or program.

“Every five minutes you invest maintaining your system in good shape and preventing the loss of files can save you as many as five hours in troubleshooting and disk data recovery,” a wise old freak once told me. In my experience, he was right.

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