Last year, about this time, I wrote an article about Spring Cleaning your computer. It dealt with the physical computer cleaning like your monitor, keyboard, mouse, inside your computer, etc. Today I have an idea to help you clean the hard drive and software on your computer.
First, get rid of any applications you do not use. If you have a program and you have not used it in year, remove it to speed up your system a bit. There are a couple of ways to do this. One easy way is to click on your start menu, scroll down the list of apps to the one(s) you want to uninstall. Right click on the name of the application and then click on, “Uninstall” and let it do its thing. You can also click on the menu and type, “Control Panel.” Next, click it to open it, in the upper right portion of the window click the drop-down for “View by:” and choose “Small icons.” (My favorite.) Look at the list and click on “Programs and Software.” Now find the program(s) you want to uninstall, click them, then click uninstall near the top. That is all you need to do to uninstall applications.
Now, we will do some more cleaning. Again, start by clicking the start menu and type, “Disk Cleanup” then click it when you see it. Choose the drive you want to clean which should be C:, regardless of other drives. If you have addiontal drives clean them up after the C drive. After it completes running on the C: drive a window will open up list a lot of items that may be cleaned. On the lower left click, “Clean up system files.” This will now add old Windows system files that may be deleted. I just ran it on my computer and it said it could clean/remove an additional 2.5 GB of space. Check all the check marks and tell it to delete them all. This will remove nothing you need on your computer, only unneeded files. It will touch no documents or files you use – this is only for clearing up space and to make room for needed files in the future.
You only need one more step to finish cleaning the hard drive. Click the start menu button again and this time type, “Defragment and Optimize Drives.” When you see it, click it and wait a few seconds for the Optimize window to open. You may not have to do much because newer computers run this automatically. Also, this will list your drive(s) as either a “Hard Disk Drive” or “Solid State Drive.” If an HDD you may defragment and optimize it. If a SSD you should not defragment it (which is grayed out so you cannot defrag it). Defragging does not to be done on a SSD and may even give it a shorter lifespan.
Now you have cleaned up your drive. If you have other drives, you may run the same things on those; however, there may not be as much to clean on other drives.
