Somebody hands me a computer and asks if it is okay. After twenty-plus years, that question comes down to five readings. Here they are, in the order I check them, with what a good number looks like and what a bad one is trying to tell you.

Drive health first, always. Every modern drive keeps a running self-report called SMART, and it will flag reallocated sectors, pending sectors, and read errors before the drive actually fails. On a healthy drive these are zero, or close to it. When they start climbing, the drive is dying, and the only correct response is to back up now and replace it soon. Windows will not show you this in plain language, which is the problem.

Free space against total. Not the raw number, the ratio. A drive that is basically full does not just leave you nowhere to save things, it makes the whole machine sluggish, because Windows needs room to work. My rough rule is to keep at least ten to fifteen percent free. When someone tells me their computer got slow "for no reason," a stuffed drive is one of the first things I find.

What is loading at startup. I open the startup list and read it like a guest list. How many programs launch the second you turn the machine on, and does each one have a reason to be there? Updaters, toolbars, and things you installed once in 2021 all pile up here. This is usually the single biggest, safest speed win available, and it costs nothing.

Temperature under load. A healthy machine runs warm, not hot. If it is throttling or shutting off when you actually ask it to do something, the cause is almost always heat, and the cause of that is hot air not being moved away. A failed\failing fan, dust buildup, or poor placement (blocking the vents) is usually the cause. This one hides well, because at idle everything looks fine. You have to push the machine to see it.

Update and security state. Last, but not optional. Is Windows actually current, is Defender on and getting updates, and is anything obviously off. Not glamorous, but it is the difference between a machine that is quietly fine and one that is quietly exposed.

That is the basic checkup. Five readings, in order, and none of them require me to install a single thing that promises to optimize anything.

This list is not a secret, and it is not hard. Every one of these is a number your computer already knows and mostly refuses to show you. The reason a "PC optimizer" can exist at all is that reading these five things by hand is annoying enough that people would rather pay to skip it. The honest version of that product is not magic. It is this checklist, automated, with nothing hidden.

If you want the conceptual version of what a full checkup covers, I wrote that up here: what a real computer checkup includes. Today's post is the numbers behind it.

Run these yourself, or have me run them with you.

Mike
PCRescue | Portland, ME