Annual Maintenance - Steps to Take?

Hello everyone, so I've had my new laptop for about 10 months now and throughout that time I've been very cautious with it. I always make sure I don't take any unnecessary risks with it such as carrying around under my arm. I've only been able to do very minimal actions though to keep it in shape because of my busy schedule during school. I clean the outside and the keyboard weekly with a cleaning solution and microfiber cloth from Antec. I also always keep it on my notebook cooler - the NotePal U3. I use it as a platform all the time but only plug it in when I play games.

Now that I have more time on my hands I want to know what are some extra steps I can take to maintaining my laptop. I own a HP Pavillion dv6tqe-7000. I regularly monitor my temps with CPUID. Over these months I'm sure my temps have gone up a bit, but I don't know how significantly. Where I live now has a higher ambient temp than before so that could also factor into the changes.

I know one option is to take the laptop apart and rid of the dust - however, I actually don't want to do this. As I said before I don't like taking risks so I'm quite paranoid about opening my laptop in case I accidentally touch something I shouldn't, strip or lose a screw, etc. I'm just not really sure what all I can or should do besides this, so any advice would be helpful.

 

One thing I do on an monthly basis on my Asus is use a vacuum cleaner near the all the vents to move any dust from the fans/heat sinks. I have not noticed any temp changes in 2 years. If you temps start to creep up you may want to try this: g73jh overheating fix - Bing Videos
If you have a standard hard drive ( NOT SSD) you could run disk cleanup, then run a defragment program. Also a complete system image can be created to an external hard drive just to save the hassle of reinstalling Windows if major issue crop up.
I also go through event viewer - ... - administrative events just to be proactive.

 

well, in short

use Ccleaner, it is free
use Windows disk defragment tool ever couple of months
use a good and updated anti-virus, if you don't wanna buy one, try AVAST Antivirus Free version, it is good and free for home users
And an important one - do not worry so much about it, use it for good. like temprature monitoring etc. I guess it is more like waste of time only. I guess you dont't do heavy gaming or stuff, then why care about temprature

 

Thanks for the replies!

The vacuum idea sounds like one I would absolutely be willing to do! Never thought of that, but do I run the risk of possibly sucking in some components of the laptop itself?

And I totally forgot about defragmentation, will look into it.