Archive for August 14th, 2007

Declutter your computer

Posted in Uncategorized on August 14th, 2007 by admin – Comments

I’ve just swapped computers with my mother, since mine just doesn’t have enough hard drive space and she was sitting with a 400GB hard drive and all she does it check her emails and play online scrabble.

Once I’d swapped them over I realized that the computer that I’m now using was running slower than a donkey trekking along Blackpool Promenade. Not good. On my quest to fine-tune this lovely piece of Compaq crap hardware I found some really great tools and tips for decluttering and optimizing your PC. By doing all of these, I got a massive 7.9GB ‘extra’ on my hard drive and increased my computer’s performance by 11%. It took me less than an hour.

  1. Empty your Recycle Bin.
  2. Clear your internet history and cached pages. Remember to save any addresses you require to your bookmarks and/or del.icio.us first! When I did this I cleared nearly 1GB of data.
  3. Delete temporary files. This can be done via ‘C:\Documents and Settings\Default User\Local Settings\Temp’ or your computer’s ‘Disk Cleanup’ program. Again, when I did this I removed 1.79GB of data.
  4. Uninstall any programs you no longer use, any trial software which has run out of free time, plugins for FireFox that you no longer use…any piece of of software you’ve not used in the past month can probably be uninstalled and free up some hard drive space.
  5. Defragment your hard drives. I aim to do this at least once a month, as well as checking my disks for errors using Auslogics Disk Defrag, which I downloaded from download.com.
  6. Go through your My Documents with a fine tooth comb and delete anything you no longer require or use. I had hundreds of folders full of half-finished .psds and notepad files full of random bits of information which I couldn’t remember why I’d saved it… I also sorted my My Documents folder into an easier to manage hierarchy, with separate folders for Web Design, Open Office documents, Coursework and Random Stuff
  7. I can now see my desktop again, since I deleted all but the essentials (My Computer, My Documents, shortcuts to PhotoShop, FireFox and Opera) from the desktop. Takes seconds, makes you feel a whole lot better.
  8. If all else fails, look out your OS reinstall disk and start again!