by Alexander Darracott

Created on: June 11, 2009

Cleaning the hard drive (not literally cleaning it, just logically cleaning it!) is a part of general hard drive and computer maintenance. Cleaning a hard drive involves the removal of programs, files, and other miscellaneous entities that happen to find their way onto the hard drive, that are no longer used or wanted any longer. It is, therefore, an important part of general hard drive maintenance because a hard drive that is full of temp files, unused applications, unused user data files and undeleted files will result in a general reduction of the operational speed of the computer as the drive's head takes longer to trawl through the information on the hard drive to locate the required pieces of data. Cleaning the hard drive will ensure that the computer in general is running as efficiently as possible, with the access speed of the information on the hard drive maximised

Recycle Bin

The recycle bin represents a portion of the hard drive where deleted files are stored until they are either restored to their original location on the hard drive, or are permanently deleted. The maximum size of this portion is 4GB, with a default allocation of 10% of total hard drive space. It is best not to allow the recycling bin to fill up to maximum capacity before emptying it because it will take a long time to delete everything and might possibly crash the system. Files can be deleted either individually or all at once through the Empty Recycle Bin command.

Install / Uninstall application

Use the install and uninstall application to uninstall applications properly; as in, to remove all application files and registry keys from the registry

Sometimes though, some aspects of the application need manual deletion, such as some image files and saved game files. It is definitely a far more effective and cleaner way of removing application files compared to simply deleting the application folder from Windows Explorer, and application files that are removed using this application bypasses the recycling bin.

Disk Clean Up

This is a very useful Windows tool that searches through folders whose content is not required for Windows, the internet or applications to run effectively. Example folders include Downloaded Program Files and Temporary Internet Files. Each type of folder can be selected or deselected from the pop up menu. To be on the safe side you can click on View Files on each folder to make fully sure that it contains the files that are to be removed. Once

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