Cleaning up your hard disk drive makes sense. If you think of the hard drive in terms of being a room, imagine that room so filled with furniture that you cannot move in it. That's just like an inefficient hard drive. It slows things down, and makes your computer experience a nightmare. This article goes through simple things which will help you to clean up that old PC hard disk and maximise your experience, even though the computer may be old.

How to speed it up.

Look at your program files regularly, and here going into the configuration panel and delete/add software, you can run through all the programs and see which ones serve no purpose any more. For example, you may have downloaded loads of things that you no longer use. Going through them carefully and deleting those things that are of no use to you frees up space.

Start up programs.

Similarly old computers are cluttered with too much information which stops them from working properly. Check your start up programs and minimise these since they make the whole procedure of turning on the computer slow and cumbersome. A great program to clear up areas like this is C Cleaner, which allows you to clean things from your hard drive which are taking up excessive space and are really not needed.

Documents

Regularly look at the documents on your drive. Here, this is an area where people build up junk. Look at alternative means of storage, since this will free up your hard drive. If you do not have an external hard drive, it is worth considering one, as this safeguards your documents without taking up any space on your computer. Simply transfer documents as you finish them, and they are safely housed in a separate unit.

Regular clean up

On Windows you have a system tool called Disk clean-up and this gets rid of junk. Running this every couple of days will rid your computer of files that are stored like temporary files and these really are not needed and should be cleaned regularly. Temporary Internet files take up space and are not needed to access those sites again, but are merely a record of things you did on your computer.

De-fragmentation

De-fragmentation takes all the little bits and pieces that are randomly scattered on the hard drive and sorts them out, a little like tidying that room that is such a mess you cannot make your way through it. Run defrag once a week. You will be surprised what room this frees up. The best period to do this task is during a period when you will not be using

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