As a PC tech, I can assure you that the best type of maintenance is preventative maintenance. One question I get asked a lot is are there any easy things that can keep a computer healthy? and as it happens, there are things that you can do to keep your computer up and running.

• Don’t smoke at your computer desk.

The thing about cigarette smoke is that it leaves behind a residue that builds up over time. The circuits in your computer are very, very thin lines of gold that do not tarnish over time. However, cigarette smoke can cause these ‘traces’ to become covered in nicotine residue and tar.

In a worst-case scenario, this can, over time, cause your system to slow down and in extreme cases even make it start to lock up and display the dreaded ‘Blue Screen of Death’. The most likely thing it will do is gum up the fan so that it stops spinning and cause a build-up of dust and cause the system to overheat.

It can be a real headache to diagnose problems caused by smoking at your PC and, in extreme circumstances, can even lead to your computers motherboard (kind of like its central nervous system) to become irreparably damaged.

• Keep your computer on a desk, rather than the floor.

This one goes double if you have a pet, like a cat or a dog. Dust builds up a little faster if the computer is kept at floor level, and pet hair can get sucked into the fans, wrap around it and stop it from spinning; this will make your system too hot, and a hot system is not a happy system.

Also, putting the PC on your desk will mean that you will be less likely to accidentally kick it or, worse, nudge the power cable out.

If you have to keep your computer on the floor, then put a tea tray under it if you have carpet, as the PC is constantly sucking in air it can pull in tiny fibres from the carpet, also if the computer is on carpet this can cause a buildup of static which can be problematic.

• Never just pull the plug.

When you are finished using your computer for the day, you should always go the menus and shut down the computer fully. This is important for a few reasons.

• From time to time, your system will need to reboot in order to update and install any patches on your system. Your computer knows to install these at the next reboot and will therefore apply them in an orderly fashion.

• If you just pull the power cable out, then you can cause serious problems for your hard drive. Imagine being halfway through a task because your system is almost always doing something-and being told to literally drop what you’re doing.

Always, no matter how much of a hurry you are in, go through the start menu and go the long way around. Your system and your PC tech will thank you.

• Keep your drives in good order.

Back a few years ago, this meant running a utility called de-frag.  Short for defragmentation, what happened with hard drives that had actual spinning disks was that data would end up spread over the whole disks, the data would become fragmented, which led to the disk having to hunt the file rather than find it in one continuous chunk. Running the De-frag utility simply rearranges the files so that the drive doesn’t have to spend time going through the drive looking for chunks of the file.

That’s with older drives, newer solid-state drives (SSD’s) don’t use spinning disks and are instead made up of programmable chips. Running a defrag on an SSD will not break it, or really be detrimental, it just won’t do anything at all (the files are kept in a different fashion). However, because of how Windows works, there is a program that does optimise your SSDs.

To ‘trim’ or defrag your drives start to type ‘Defrag’ into the search bar on the windows task bar, select defrag and optimise drives, highlight the drive you want to work on and select ‘optimise’ or defrag dependent on the type of drive you have and let the program run.

• Keep your system cool.

Your computer’s system is like an eco-system, it has its own climate.  All the chips in your computer desperately need to be kept cool; the problem is that pumping power into them and having them process billions of bits of information every second, even in a idle state, generates heat and a lot of it.

No matter how advanced your system, be it an ultra-modern liquid cooled gaming PC or an absolute relic, the basic physics of keeping the system cool remains the same. Your system will have an external fan that sucks air in and blows it into the system to keep your chips from frying.

There are a number of things that you can do to make sure your fan is doing its job to the best of its ability, you can make sure that the case is completely closed, it’s a common misconception that havering the side off of your system will keep it cooler, depending on how good your CPU fan is it could keep up with the gaping hole in the side of the system, but then there is a dust issue.

You can also, once every three months, use your vacuum cleaner to clean out any dust that builds up in your fans. A clean fan leads to a happy system!