It’s Springtime, Which Is a Great Time to Maintain Your Computers

It’s springtime in my hemisphere, and as tradition demands, I’ve spent the last few weekends clearing everything out of one room in my house, then cleaning everything from ceiling to floor (if you think about it, starting at the ceiling and working your way down makes a lot more sense and lets gravity help with the detritus removal process, but I digress). It’s a lot of work, but anytime I feel my back twinge during the week, I get a blast of the intense sense of satisfaction that was my reward for all that hard work.

I don’t think we really have an equivalent of spring cleaning for technology. In the old days, an operating system reinstall was the second or third thing Apple and Google recommended if your phone was behaving oddly, and the annual reinstall of Windows or OSX was just part of the cost of doing business. It was so popular a topic that we did annual cover stories at Maximum PC telling people what tools they could use to make that reinstall as painless as possible. People loved that new Windows feel, before you installed all the software that jacked up your computer.

But over the last decade, reinstalling the operating has become the nuclear option, for when you have Really Serious Problems with your devices. The data on our computers and phones is so important to us that it doesn’t make sense to take the risk of a clean OS install unless we absolutely have to.

Overall, this is a good change. It means that our computers are reliable enough that they usually work from the time we buy them until the time we replace them. And our computers are lasting longer than ever before—my typical laptop lasts at least 4 or 5 years now, and I’m fairly typical, with a fair amount of variation based on whether you buy high- or low-end hardware. The only downside of computers lasting longer is that if you don’t make a concerted effort to clear out stuff you don’t use, your computers will end up full of cruft.

Cruft Sounds Bad. It’s Bad Right?

What is computer cruft exactly? It’s all the little stuff that lingers on your PC even after you’ve removed the software that installed it, from leftover files and applications that you haven’t uninstalled to the unnecessary options in your right-click context menus. It’s the programs that you leave running in your system tray, the weird drivers that some software installs, and a lot more. (There are a boatload of somewhat scammy applications that promise to clean this crap out of your PC, but in my experience those apps usually just make your PC problems worse.)

Does that cruft make your computer slower? The answer is “It depends”, mainly on what operating system you use. Since Apple started transitioning from Intel to Apple CPUs, they’ve been slowly transforming MacOS to essentially be an immutable operating system.

Immutable, in this instance, means that big chunks of the system files that the computer uses to boot and run software are locked down so that they can only be changed as part of operating system updates. It’s common in phones and has seen growing popularity in the Linux world for certain types of installs, including the Steam Deck.

The immutable OS renders modern Macs running Apple silicon relatively immune to cruft. You can install software that runs in the background and crushes your performance, but uninstalling that software will fix the problem. The worst-case fix for a crufted up Mac these days is to create a new user account and start using it instead of the one you ruined.

Windows is a little more complicated. Because you can install software that interacts with every part of the OS all the way down to the kernel, you can end up in situations where software you’ve installed makes Windows janky and slow. I’m in the middle of some long-term testing that’s quantifying the impact of a crapped-up Windows install on performance. More on that soon, but the early results indicate that there’s isn’t really a perf hit for running an old install of Windows, beyond the stuff running in the background and taking up resources. These tests aren’t making me rethink my basic strategy of only reinstalling Windows when I absolutely have to.

What Do You Actually Need to Maintain?

This is weird advice to give for a newsletter, where headlines like “YOUR COMPUTER IS MAKING YOU CONSTIPATED” or something more sensationalist would probably drive mad engagement, but generally speaking, computers these days don’t need a ton of actual maintenance. They’re reliable and will keep working for years on end, even when faced with almost malicious levels of neglect. I try to focus only on the work that will have an actual impact on my user experience, so with that in mind, here’s the regular maintenance work I do on my PCs and my family’s Macs.

• Pay attention to the software that’s allowed to run all the time. It can have a substantial impact on your computer’s performance and battery life.

• On Windows, these apps are usually hidden in your system tray (you’ll need to click the ^ next to the networking icon to see everything that’s running). Those applications make your computer take longer to boot and use CPU, memory, and also battery. For me, tools that I use all the time like Dropbox, Slack, Discord, 1Password and Fan Control make the cut. I disable all of the other crap in there using the Startup tab in Task Manager. (If you accidentally disable something that you need to make your computer work, you can always reenable it in the same spot).

• On the Mac, the always running programs live on the right side of your Menu Bar. You can see what runs at startup and what has permission to stay running in the background by going to Settings > General > Login Items.

• I make sure that I keep my operating system, applications, and drivers updated. Phones, tablets, and Macs have spoiled me over the last decade, because that work usually happens invisibly in the background on those platforms. But Windows users still need to hit Windows Update as well as the tools provided by your hardware vendors to keep everything updated.

• I monitor the amount of storage that’s free on my drives—for reasons I don’t fully understand, running out of disk space makes Windows slow to a crawl. There are a bazillion tools that help you visualize where all the space on your hard drive went, but my current favorite is WizTree. Unlike WinDirStat, which was built for now-ancient OSes and file systems, and has to actually traverse each folder on your drive to suss out how much space each file takes, WizTree reads the filesystem itself and is really fast as a result. It’s free for personal use, and I highly recommend it. PS. The thing that’s eating all of your drive space is probably games.

  

  WizTree gives you a good way to find out which applications are hogging space on your drive, even if the individual files are buried deep in subfolders.

• It’s also a good time to look at your phones, tablets, and other devices and remove the software that you aren’t using anymore (or at least take a look at the Privacy settings panel and audit the apps that have access to location tracking, health data, microphone access, local network access, and anything else that you’d like to limit. Either uninstall the offending apps or disable their access.

• That’s really it. I generally only recommend you do things like update your BIOS or firmware if you have a specific need. While BIOS updates are much lower risk now than they used to be, recovering from a failed update is still a pain in the ass and even if things go well, there’s a strong likelihood that you’ll have to reset your settings, potentially hammering perf. The exception is if you’re running a 13th- or 14th-gen Intel CPU and haven’t updated your BIOS since last fall, you should 100% update your BIOS with the current one, which will apply the fix for the over-voltage problems that killed a bunch of Raptor Lake processors over the last few years.

That’s pretty much, aside from physically cleaning my devices.

An Aside On the Importance of Actually Cleaning Your Devices

Full disclosure: This section has a bunch of affiliate links to Amazon, so if you buy something I recommend here I’ll get a portion of each sale. Also, I get it if you don’t like Amazon. You won’t hurt my feelings if you buy stuff elsewhere. It’s probably a good idea to get in the habit of physically cleaning your devices more often than once a year. Most of the recommendations I found about phone cleanliness date back to the pandemic, when people seemed slightly more concerned with hygiene. The current guidelines are that you should wipe your phone down daily, and remove the case for a thorough cleaning on the regular.

I like these Zeiss lens wipes for phones and computer screens, but they include a ton of packaging (and disposable wipes are never great for the environment), so I try to only use them on the go. I keep good microfibers and bottled cleaner around when I’m at home, but you want to make sure that you’re always applying the cleaner to your microfiber, rather than directly to the device so that you avoid drips that can kill sensitive electronics. If you get larger microfibers, they’ll do double duty—a slightly damp cloth is a great way to clean dust off the outside of your computer case or laptop.

I wipe my keyboard and mouse down less frequently than I do my phone, but I also tend to have clean hands at my PC, since I rarely eat at the computer. I have a soft dust brush on my desk, which is great for brushing crumbs and bits of dead skin and hair off of my keyboard, mouse mat, and desktop. Hidden in its handle, it has a small metal pick and a few tiny brushes for cleaning small, delicate devices with lots of crevices, like Airpods. And it does triple duty as a fidget when I’m on calls.

I live in a particularly dusty house, because we keep the windows open roughly 300 days a year. That means the dust filters on my devices are essential and need regular cleaning. While you use canned air for minor dust problems or pop them off and clean them in the sink for bigger problems, I invested in an electric duster a few years ago, and use it all the time. It’s great for blasting crud out of dust filters on my desktop PC, blowing dust out of laptops and consoles, and cleaning stuff like reusable vacuum cleaner filters. I even use it to deep clean our dehumidifier and air filters (the inbound areas of household air filters get surprisingly nasty).

When I bought a fancy mechanical keyboard with white keycaps, I didn’t consider how nasty the natural oil on my skin would make the caps. To remove the finger goo without a bunch of scrubbing, I got an ultrasonic bath cleaner. A few drops of dish soap in the bath with nastiest of keycaps blasts all the crud right off. Be careful if you have fancy multishot caps though, as the ultrasonic bath can cause them to delaminate if there are voids in the material. I also use the ultrasonic bath to clean my eyeglasses, but again you should be careful if your glasses have scratches. Using the ultrasonic bath on scratched lenses can cause bubbles to form in your lens coatings.

What’s Next?

I’ve got more real-life spring cleaning to do in the house, and it’s about time to plant the summer garden (tomatoes, lettuce, spring onions, cucumbers, and maybe a watermelon vine or two are on the plan for this year). Eventually I’ll get to cleaning my office and probably also the garage, but probably not while I’m in the post-GDC busy season.

I’ve been playing 33 Immortals this week, which is an incredible large-scale co-op roguelike. It’s a bit intimidating at first, but it’s giving me real early-2000s MMO raid feels, without the awful early-2000s MMO grind.

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