What can I do to extend the life of my PC or laptop?

[WWM_Adam]

• Keep the room that your PC or laptop is in well ventilated and cool.
  
• Remove dust by regularly cleaning the inside of the PC with a compressed air can. With laptops you can remove dust by blowing the fan vent which will remove dust from inside the vent. (The PC or laptop must be turned off before).
  
• Keep your PC off the floor. Having your computer on the floor tends to increase the amount of dust and hair particles that are sucked into the PC clogging up vital air flow, which will increase the core temperature of system components and damaging them beyond repair.
  
• Keep your PC up to date with both Windows updates and viral / spyware updates, this keeps the software side of windows security protected.
  
• Check for hard drive errors every couple of months (this keeps your hard drive protected from hardware corruption. If errors are found then it is suggested to replace the hard drive as corruption tends to get worse over a short time).
  
• Defragment your PC once a year (on NTFS partitions) or every couple of months (on FAT partitions). This makes sure that the hard drive can access data faster without having the scan the sectors for the data it needs.
  
• Run a Disk Cleanup every 6 months. This just removes unnecessary files that is not needed by windows and clears up the hard drive.