Well, it’s that time of year again. Time to spend an entire weekend cleaning your house and maybe your garage too. But, Don’t forget your computer! Your hard drive can get bogged down with useless data and files that just sit there and take up disk space. Here are 3 ways to clean you’re Hard Drive, Speed up your computer and even gain back Gig’s of disk space!

Defragment your Hard Drive

Fragmentation happens to a hard disk over time as you save, change, or delete files. The changes that you save to a file are often stored at a location on the hard disk that’s different from the original file. Additional changes are saved to even more locations. Over time, both the file and the hard disk itself become fragmented, and your computer slows down as it has to look in many different places to open a file. To fix this, Open your computer’s Disk defragmentor by going into My Computer and right clicking your C:/ Drive. Next click properties and under the Tools tab click Defragment Now. Defragmentation can take anywhere from minutes to hours depending on how fragmented your drive is.

Clean Your Disk

A large chunk of data on your hard drive is useless data. This can consist of partially deleted files, old error logs, and cookies. To clean this off of your hard drive, go to Control Panel and click under System Maintenance. In the Admin Tools is the Disk Cleaner. Check all of the boxes and it will tell you how much space you will gain after the clean.

Delete Unused Programs

You can gain a few more Gigs by deleting old programs that are never used. To do this, open Control Panel and go to Add/Remove Programs. You will be given a list of programs installed on your computer which you can then uninstall if you don’t use them. REMEMBER: DO NOT DELETE SOMETHING IF YOU DONT KNOW WHAT IT IS!

And for more tips on spring cleaning…

• Clean Your Microwave With a Lemon
• Turbo Charge Your Laundry With Tennis Balls
• Alternative Uses of WD40

Share any other methods of cleaning your computer (or optimizing it) in the comments!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 20th, 2008 at 12:18 pm and is filed under Technology.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.