This is the last in the series regarding ways to speed up your computer as it slows down with age. As I promised last week, this week we start with something that could be significant for some of you. OneDrive is Microsoft’s version of cloud storage which has been around since 2007. For those of you that have been using it that long do you remember when it started life as SkyDrive? Anyway, it is online/cloud storage for your files. It gives you 5 GB of storage for free and there are increasing sizes of space you can get for a price. This is true with most all cloud storage applications. Also, OneDrive will store most any type of file; however, it blends seamlessly with the other Microsoft Office products.
OneDrive has a significant feature to save you space on your computer’s drive and possibly speed it up a bit. As we did last week, go again to the start menu, click, and type, “Storage settings” then click it when you see “Storage settings” at the top of the list. A window will open that reads, “Storage.”
Click on the link at the top that states, “Configure Storage Sense or run in now.” There are several other settings there before you get to OneDrive which I will mention here. I suggest the following, turn on Storage Sense. This will clean up files you do not need to have on your computer. I set mine to “Every week” which is neither a good nor bad choice, just my pick. Any of the others are fine except I would not use “During low free disk space” as that I believe is not taking the best care of your hard drive.
I set all the following settings to “1 day” which is again my choice, read them and decide what works for you. The first two are for deleting all the unneeded files in your Recycle Bin and deleting all of your files in your Download folder. These could be immensely full if you have never deleted them before. I helped someone speed up their computer a few weeks ago, and it removed 11 GB of worthless files.
Now, scroll down the page to, “Locally available cloud content,” where if you use it, you will see OneDrive. OneDrive allows the files to be stored in the cloud and only downloaded to your hard drive when you need to edit or print them. Here you can choose how long you want them to stay downloaded on your hard drive before it sends them from your hard drive back to keep them safely stored in the cloud. Since it takes only a couple of seconds to download files in OneDrive to your computer, it is convenient to use; set it and forget it.
Finally, if you wish to do so, you can click the Clean now button and begin the process as you set it above. It will run for a few seconds to minutes, depending on how much junk it needs to remove. Then you are on the way to a cleaner and, most likely faster computer.
If none of these suggestions worked over the past three articles, next week I have one that is guaranteed to work by Microsoft, but not me.
