Guide to clean your hard drive

By sophiesummers on 9:47 PM

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Your hard disk drive is one of the most important parts of your PC. It’s where all your system files, applications and user data reside. If your hard disk becomes too full, your computer will not have any room to work and will slow to a creep. You can avoid this type of slowdown by doing a little cleaning up given below.


Emptying the Trash: 
One of the quickest ways to clean up your hard drive is to empty your Recycle Bin (Trash Bin for Mac users) frequently. You can do this by either clicking on the bin, then selecting to empty the bin, or you can use the Cleanup utility offered by Windows. Open My Computer, right-click a hard drive icon, select Properties, and then click the Disk Cleanup button. This one action will allow you to free up a large amount of drive space that was occupied by superfluous files.


Removing Old Files: 
Old files also misuse some space on your hard drive, If you are running low on hard drive space, then you should clean up your hard drive by removing files that you no longer use. Windows users can try the Add/Remove Programs utility to “uninstall” unwanted programs. On Macs, Appzapper goes through your application folder, helping you to remove unneeded and unused software. If you run Ubuntu Linux, try the built-in Disk Usage Analyzer, for other Linux/Gnome environments. You can use it to find large files, overstuffed folders, and other hard-to-find junk. Mac users may also want to check out grandperspective, which does a similar job.

Over the time, you could have dozen copy of the same file lying in different corners of your system. The best place is to hunt them down and eliminate them before they take control of the hard disk. Fslint is a utility to find and clean various forms of lint on a file system, especially duplicate files and broken symlinks. If you wants to use a free addition then go for “system care” which is a very useful tool for windows computer.


Run a Virus Scan: Make sure to scan your computer for viruses and spyware on a regular basis; if you leave your computer for a span of time each day that is a great time to run a scan. There are a lot of antivirus out in the market. Norton and McAfee are two of the most popular. Remember that you must keep your subscription to these packages up-to-date in order to protect yourself against new viruses.


Keep your desktop clean:
If you save a lot of stuff to your desktop, it takes long time for your computer to boot up once Windows starts. A good idea is either to move things to “My Documents” or create folders for each grouping of icons on your desktop and move the icons to the folders. It will be better if you are going to keep these file for a long time then it is safer to move these files to another drive so that when you starts windows it won’t take more time further.

The next thing you should run is the Disk Defragmenter:
When you store stuffs on your hard drive, they get put in different places, and that means your computer has to search through more of your hard drive in order to find an item. Defragmenter puts data in a more rational order, so your computer will know where to look. You can also find Disk Defragmenter under Programs, then Accessories, then System Tools. Select your C: / Drive and click “Analyze.” The analysis will tell you whether or not you need to defragment your disk. If you do, click on the button that says “Defragment;” after it organizes your data, your hard drive will be cleaned and run faster.

Don’t be afraid to uninstall programs that you don’t use anymore. Keeping your computer clean may not make you anymore consecrate, but is a worthwhile attempt. Remember, just like anything else, your computer hard drive needs to be kept clean in order to work properly. Keep up with these steps and your computer will continue running fast and your hard drive will stay clean!

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