How hard is it to maintain a gaming PC?

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jonesy26

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Aug 18, 2014
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I'm about to make the switch to pc gaming instead of consoles. I understand that with a pc you have to clean your fans and do some dusting every once in a while. I'm more concerned about software myself. With a console you have an advantage of not having to worry about viruses, no defragging your hard drive, etc.

My main question is how much you have to spend doing that kind of stuff and what else I have to do. I took care of my xbox, I cleaned dust off the fans of that, stuff like that. But that's really the extent of what you have to worry about.

I'm mainly concerned because this gaming pc is about a thousand dollars, and I've never done this before.

Thanks
 
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Gam3r01
Its not hard at all.
I clean my PC every 4 months, but thats due to my location in the mountains, lots of dust. 6 months is great, you can go a year in most cases.

As for software, once you get anti virus it will self perpetuate itself, no need to baby sit it. I run a scan once a month, always comes back clean.
Drivers and updates are most of the time automatic, and the rest are a click of a button.

EDIT: Forgot the defrag part. With an SSD its not needed. For a HDD once every few years can be a bit much even then.
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Gam3r01

Gam3r01

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Jan 12, 2013
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Its not hard at all.
I clean my PC every 4 months, but thats due to my location in the mountains, lots of dust. 6 months is great, you can go a year in most cases.

As for software, once you get anti virus it will self perpetuate itself, no need to baby sit it. I run a scan once a month, always comes back clean.
Drivers and updates are most of the time automatic, and the rest are a click of a button.

EDIT: Forgot the defrag part. With an SSD its not needed. For a HDD once every few years can be a bit much even then.
 
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kanewolf

kanewolf

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May 29, 2013
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The biggest difference, in my opinion, is using the PC for things other than gaming. It will become a central repository of photos, audio and video files, etc. Consequently a consistent backup philosophy and appropriate hardware is required. The MINIMUM would be a USB drive and some scheduled backup software which will do unattended backups. Putting your PC to sleep rather than powering off allows backups to happen in the middle of the night (or middle of the day if you are a night owl). Good power protection is another maintenance difference. Again, if you have valuable data on the PC, ensuring clean power with battery backup is important.
 
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jonesy26

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Aug 18, 2014
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So its not as complicated as it looks? That's great. I just keep hearing a bunch of stuff like "back up this every x" and "install this every x". I'm all for learning more about computers, in fact that's where I want to go in my career. But it's a bit overwhelming buying my first pc I gotta say
 
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