Fall Break. . . For Me

I have been of Fall break this week.  I have still been working though, Mothers never get a true break.  Sprat had to go to the doctor yesterday, he has a sinus infection.  Ughhhh!!!  Today since I have had a few hours to my self I have been trying to clean my computer up.  This is my monster desktop that we have had since 2006.  It has not been turned on since 2012, because it was having such issues.
Today I decided I would put what I have learned to good use.  I laid out my static mat and set my tower on it, I put on my static bracelet and began vacuuming the outside of the case.  I then laid the case down and took off the side panel, and wow mama, there was a lot of dust in there.  It is any wonder how this thing has not caught fire before now.  I had BIG dust bunnies in this case.  You would not think that a computer could accumulate such dust.  EEEEEkkkkk!
Everything in the case looked good, no blown up capacitors like I have seen in other computers I worked on at school. I vacuumed the inside of the case gently.  Once I was satisfied with the cleaning I closed it back up.   I powered the old girl up and she started right up.  No smoke, no fire.
I began with a basic virus scan since I had not had updated virus protection on it for a while now.  I had one threat and I got rid of that.  Then I did a malware scan too.  Not all virus protection will scan or catch malware so it is good to have both on your system.  Clean scan there too.  I was surprised.  I decided to do a system defragmenting program too.  The newer systems that have solid state drives do not require defragmenting.  My system is older and has a platter type hard drive (HDD).   I must say that was a mess.  It needed defragmenting badly.
Now that I am sure I don't have any viruses or malware on my system I am going to pull my many, many, many picture files off the hard drive.  I bought an external hard drive to back up my pictures almost a year ago.  I am in the process of doing that now.  So far so good.  I highly recommend if you have a lot of pictures on your system that you back them up periodically.  If something happens to that hard drive it is hard to get those pictures back.   If you are like me, once everything went digital, I stopped printing pictures.  My kids whole life was on this system and that is why I am so excited about retrieving those pictures.  These are pictures I have not even looked at for over a year.  
I feel like I have actually accomplished something today.  yayyy me!!!