Clean My PC: How to Clean Up Your Computer

You may be good about dusting your PC, wiping down your monitor and cleaning out your keyboard, but are you really cleaning your computer? Cleaning your hard drive can be just as important as cleaning the outside of your computer. By keeping up on your computer maintenance, you can extend the life of your PC and improve its performance.

Cleaning your PC is especially important if you’ve been experiencing slowness. If you have tons of useless files clogging up your machine, it will become sluggish and possibly even freeze or crash. Follow these easy steps and you’ll be on your way to having a clean, happy computer.

1. Delete or Store Old Files

Remember that time you snapped 50 pictures of the sunset, trying to get the best one? Picture and video files take up a ton of room on your hard drive. Remove the ones you don’t really need (you know, the one where you accidentally had your finger in front of the lens). Try sorting your files by size and looking at the largest files. This could include not only pictures, but also presentations, brochures and music files. If you don’t need them, delete them. Then buy yourself an external hard drive and archive the files you don’t need every day, but you don’t want to get rid of (like the pictures from your vacation 10 years ago). With an external hard drive, you can remove these files from your computer but still have access to them at any time. It’s also a good idea to store the external hard drive in a fire-safe box to safeguard your important files and memories.

2. Delete Unnecessary Files and Software

Now start looking around at other files and software that you don’t use, especially the ones that are taking up a lot of space. Delete programs that you know you never use (like that free photo editing software that came with something you bought years ago or the free edition of QuickBooks that you’ve never used). But be careful. Do not delete any programs or files if you don’t know what they are. They could have a very important purpose in the running of your computer even if you don’t recognize their names.

Other things you can do to remove unnecessary files:
• Clear your cache.
• Delete any temporary internet files.
• Empty your recycle bin. All of the files you deleted end up there before being permanently removed from your system, so they’re still taking up room.
• Delete files that end in .tmp. These are temporary files that don’t need to stick around.
• Delete files that end in .chk. If the computer doesn’t close down properly, it creates filecheck files, but they aren’t necessary to keep.

3. Defrag Computer

If you’re looking for a deep clean, consider defragging your computer. Your Windows operating system can store files and programs in different places throughout your hard drive. As you continue to add more files, the system becomes fragmented and you have hundreds of files broken up in multiple locations. By going through the defragmentation process, you can get all parts of a file into the same place. This process will help your computer to run more quickly and more efficiently.

After going through these simple clean-up procedures, your computer will run better, and you’ll be happy knowing that you’re taking good care of your computer, inside and out.