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When you buy a brand new computer, it's much like a new car: It runs well, it's clean, and everything works as it should. But after 15,000 miles, it's time for a service — and the same goes for your computer.

The fact is, like cars, computers are complex machines, and they need just as much maintenance to keep them ship-shape. Fortunately, while you need a mechanic to fix most car issues, you can perform a lot of basic maintenance on your computer.

Basic computer maintenance
At the heart of every computer is your hard drive. Every photo that you open, every website that you browse, and every song you listen to requires your hard drive to spin up, find the data that it needs, and read it. That process in itself isn't messy — it's when you try to write at the same time that things get messy.

If you listen to iTunes (reading music from the hard drive) and then save a document you're working on, that document gets dumped onto your hard drive immediately. Your hard drive doesn't try to find an empty space to put the document — it just dumps it there with your music files, or your program files, or wherever it happens to be!

You won't notice a performance decrease immediately, but after a few months, your hard drive will become fragmented. That's when everything takes ages to load — and that's when it's time for your first bit of computer maintenance.

Defragmenting your drive
The process of defragmentation is simple: it takes those file fragments and moves them together. It moves each program so that all of its files are together on the hard drive — and then it does the same for your documents, music and photos. It doesn't stop the fragmentation process from happening again, though, so you do need to defragment regularly. There's no harm in running a defragmenter once a week; the more often you do it, the quicker the process will be.

Windows users, to defragment your drive and learn a bit more about hard drives in general, check out our guide. If you need more guidance, Microsoft has a short and informative video on defragmenting your hard drive.

General housekeeping
Like the oil of your car, your computer gradually gets bogged down with digital detritus. Temporary files from browsing the web and old unused programs are the most common culprits, and it only takes a few clicks to clean them up.

To launch the disk cleanup tool, hit the Windows key on your keyboard or click the Start button on your desktop, type "disk cleanup" and press enter. The selected drive should be correct (C:) — if not, select the drive with a Windows flag next to it and press OK. It will then take a while to inspect your computer, but eventually it will show you a list of files that can be safely cleaned up. By default, it will select only a few files to delete, but you can be more aggressive and select anything in the list. The more you select, the more space you will save and the faster your computer will be. Microsoft has a short video showing how to use Disk Cleanup, if you need more guidance.

The next step is to uninstall old programs that you don't use. You might want to do this to make space for new programs, or maybe you just want to remove all of the pre-installed stuff that comes with most new computers.

To uninstall programs, hit the Windows key on your keyboard or click the Start button on your desktop, type "uninstall a program" and press enter. Now it's just a matter of finding the programs you want to uninstall, and I'm afraid I can't help you with that. Look for programs with names you don't even recognize; they are prime suspects for space-wasting!

Malware and spyware
Finally, the last step is to delete the hidden programs that might be running on your computer. Just by surfing the web, you will accrue a variety of nasty cookies and nefarious programs (malware). Fortunately, removing them is simply a matter of downloading a free program and running it every week or two.

To clean your computer of malware and spyware, grab Malwarebytes (the free version is fine). Install it by following the prompts (you can't go wrong by hitting Next over and over). Once it's installed, run the program. If it asks to update its definitions, let it. Then hit "Perform full scan" and click Scan to begin!

It will take a while, and you might see a scarily large number of "Objects infected," but don't worry! Once the process is finished, hit Remove Selected on the left. You may be asked to reboot your computer to complete the process.

And that's it! Your computer should now have a lot more free space, run faster, and be free from any nasty programs.