 Spring Cleaning Your Hard Drive
It's that time of year again. Time to get your house ready for Spring. Throw open the windows and pay special attention to all the little household details you have been neglecting all Winter. This is a good time to pay special attention to your computer too.
Begin by clicking the Start button and clicking All Programs. Go through all the programs on your computer. Open up everything you have an icon for. Make sure it still works properly by giving it a little exercise. You may find a few programs you have removed, but the icons in the Start Programs are still hanging around.
uninstall
If you used a good uninstaller the first time around, you shouldn't see too many of these orphan icons. Look in the Control Panel for Add/Remove Programs and always remove software you no longer need from there. It is always better than just deleting the folder and can help avoid lots of nasty surprises. You may also discover other programs you have installed, don't use, never have used, and never intend to use. These are prime candidates for removal too. Make sure to only remove software you have installed. If you want to get rid of something that was pre-installed on your machine, do a little google research first to make sure it can be safely removed.
When you have uninstalled the programs you don't use any more, be sure to check your Documents folder for personal files that can be deleted. Before deleting any personal files, open them first. The name on the file may not mean anything to you until you see it opened. It is much easier to change your mind before the file is history. Of course, Windows does have that nice recycle bin, so if you do trash something, you have at least one decent opportunity to change your mind.
Deleting personal files you don't need any more isn't going to give you a noticeable amount of extra hard drive space, especially with hard drives today being so much larger than ever before. Hard drive space isn't the issue with personal files. Making it easier to find files that mean something to you is. You won't have to wade through a bunch of obsolete files looking for something you want.
Use your disk utilities to take care of the final touches to your Spring Cleaning effort. These can be found by clicking the Start button, going to All Programs, looking under Accessories and System Tools. Run Disk Cleanup first, then Disk Defragmenter. The Defragmenter utility will close up all those gaps left on your hard drive by deleting programs and files, so all that space can be used efficiently again. It will also make your computer seem faster, because it won't have to look as hard for your programs any more.
Better than Disk Defragmenter
Diskeeper has the native Windows disk defragmenter beaten hands down. If you can add it to your budget, it is a much better alternative.
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