Speed Up Your Computer in 2 Easy Steps
By ryan | July 8, 2007
You should run maintenance tools every couple of weeks on your computer, but honestly, who does that? Even once a month is too much to ask for some people. A lot of computer users simple just forget to maintain their computers, even myself. There are a couple quick fixes you can do though when you notice your computer is slowing down a bit, or, if you just figure ‘Hey I don’t think I’ve cleaned up my computer lately”.
These two utilities are Disk Cleanup and Disk Defragmenter.
1. Disk Cleanup
Disk Cleanup is a great tool for your computer. This tool helps you free up space on your hard drive by searching for files that are safe to delete. You can choose some, all or none of these features when running it.
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Remove temporary Internet files (good)
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Remove downloaded program files ( good)
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Empty the Recycle Bin (good. I always forget to do this)
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Remove Windows temporary files (temp files are a waste of space, trash em!)
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Remove optional Windows components you aren’t using (this is up to you)
- Remove installed Programs you no longer use (again, up to you)
Accessing Disk Cleanup
To get to Disk Cleanup, Click Start > Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Disk Cleanup.
Firs, it’ll ask which hard drive to clean. If you have an external drive or another drive added to your computer, this is where you can pick to clean that up.
Next, you will get a window that will gather what what can be deleted. This might take a while if you have never ran this before or if you haven’t performed a cleanup in a while.
Once it finished looking for files to delete, you will get here, where you can choose what to delete. You will be surprised how junk can accumulate. I cleaned up almost 3 gigs of space when I ran this.
Thats it you’re done!
2. Disk Defrag
As hard drives get more advanced and can hold even more data, they also gain the ability to clutter up. After creating, deleting, and modifying files over the time you have a hard drive, the drive will most certainly become fragmented. Simply put, a file isn’t stored in one place in its entirety, or in a technically in a contiguous location. Instead bits and pieces of a file are stored wherever the hard drive can find space.
As this happens, it slows down the drives performance and reliability. That’s why it is extremely important to do this. Otherwise, your hard drive can crap out much sooner than it should and can also lose data because of this.
Accessing Disk Defrag
To get to Disk Defragmenter, Click Start > Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Disk Defragmenter.
NOTE: ALWAYS run disk cleanup first. that way you won’t be organizing things your about to get rid of anyway.
Once you are here, just click the defragment button and walk away because it’ll take some time, depending on how often you defrag. Then, your off to having a more organized and cleaner computer! Don’t click the analyze button. It will take forever to finish and all it will say is “hey your computer will be a little more organized”. So don’t click it and save yourself the time.
“What do I do if I have more that one hard drive?” You ask? If you have multiple hard drives just click the one you want to defrag and thats it.
Topics: Optimization, Windows |