Cleaning Hard Drive Hints & Tips

cleaning hard drive hints and tips. Whenever i think of cleaning hard drive , i always seem to see my mum with her cloth and can of spray polish, but really whichever way you look at it ,

it's one of those chores you either love or hate

The first big part of cleaning a hard drive is clearing out or deleting unused or unneeded files,

this can be quite time consuming if you have no kind of organizational structure on you computer or you have other people who use it and leave file everywhere,

Once you've finished this the next part is the auto clean, this will clean up temporary files, unused files, duplicates,

go to my computer, you can access this from the start menu or just hit the windows key & E and it will popup

Right click on your hard disk "local Disk" (C:) once this is completed you can also run if on the "Local Disk" (D:) if you have one

Select properties and select disk cleanup
it will begin to compress files and tell you how much space it can clear for you,

If your running windows XP

when it's finished look along the top and you will see a tab labelled "more options" select this,
now select the bottom option system restore

You will get a message popup asking if you would like to delete all but the most recent restore point,

this will free up quite a lot of space, once this has finished , click back onto the other tab " disk cleanup "
click ok and it will perform such maintenance as deleting temporary Internet files, emptying the waste basket, plus a whole lot more.

The next step is the one that takes the longest the disk defragmenting

defrag hard drive file fragmentation is the name given to split files on you computer, when you have a new computer did it seem to run that much faster ?,

bet it did, one of the reasons for this was probably near zero file fragmentation, as you use your computer, files are stored to the hard drive over and over again , eventually some files get split or broken into two or maybe three pieces and then stored in different areas ,

of course this is completely unknown to the person using the computer , but it does mean if you load a fragmented file it will have to be loaded from maybe two or three locations ,

hence the slower loading times. one of the key factors that causes a big degradation in hard drive performance is file fragmentation, it's something that doesn't happen quickly,

but over the months and in some cases years the the hard disk slowly becomes more and more fragmented, and then your new speedy computer isn't quite so speedy any more.

To rectify this go back to my computer, right click again on the hard drive Local Disk (C:) select properties ,

select the tools tab, and defragment now, this will take you to the disk defragmenting tool, you can select analyze first if you wish , but after click on defragment,

and it will be off and running, depending on the level of fragmentation the hard drive size and the speed of it,

this may take a while, once it's finished you can also run it on any other hard drives or partitions in you computer.
cleaning hard drive

It's worth running the disk defragmentation tool every few weeks , just to keep your computer running well.

Cleaning Hard Drive

Hope you found this document of use

why not read some of our other articles
Windows Security , how secure is your computer ?

Computer Tech Support , for both hardware and software support

After cleaning hard drive checkout Pc Booster how to get your pc in tip top condition

Can't Find What you're Looking for?
Checkout our Custom Site Search..