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Error Checking

Another process that helps Windows maintain its stability is error-checking.
Error-checking verifies the logical integrity of a file system. If it finds things that are not arranged as they should be in the file system data, it will do some voodoo and repair them!

Be warned, that this is the longest, most time consuming of all the procedures described. This can take up to an hour or more, and you will not be able to do anything else on your machine while error-checking is active!

As with disk defragmentation, I'd recommend doing this at least once a month, or more often, if you notice that some of your programs behave strangely, you get crashes, etc.

The good news is that you can get it all set-up, but the process won't start until you reboot your computer. So this is something you can set up any time in your work day, and then before going home go to your Start button, and choose the "Restart" instead of the "shut down" option.

As before, right-click your C: (Hard Drive) and go to properties, and then click the "Tools" tab.

This time, click on the "check now" button. Go ahead and select the "Automatically fix file system errors" and "Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors" options.

Go ahead and click "Start", it's OK! You will get an error message, which is fine:

Say "Yes" to the option above, and go ahead and go back to what you were doing. When you're ready to leave your computer for some time, reboot (restart) your machine, and the error-checking will kick-in. You will see a blue screen, and plain text that tells you how far in the process the utility is.

Once again, let it finish. It will reboot again by itself when it's done, and take your computer to the main logon screen. It's fine to leave your machine like that overnight.

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