Computer Care Network

There are many things that need to be done on a regular basis. Cleaning up your computer is one of them. Below are guidelines to help you with clean up your hard drive. Take the time to perform these cleaning steps on a regular basis.

Scandisk

Scandisk is a Windows system tool to diagnose and repair computer files and directory structures. It also runs a scan of your hard drive to mark off bad sectors. Scandisk will help to speed up your computer enabling faster access to files and folder, and should any bad sector be detected, prepare yourself to replace the hard drive as soon as you can.

Open Windows Explorer and right click on the C: drive. Click on properties and select the tools tab and click the Error Checking button.

Disk Defragmenter

Disk Defragmenter is also a Windows system tool. Disk Defragmenter will optimize your computers’ performance by rewriting the data on you hard drive. Files store to the hard drive are broken apart so to ensure that you receive maximum storage space, but this causes the computer to slow down as it searches for all the peices of the file. Defragmenting you drive to ensures that files are written together on the hard drive.
Make sure you are not running any other programs

Click the Start button and go to Programs, Accessories, System Tools and select Disk Defragmenter.

Disk Clean up

The Windows system stores many temporary files, this is fine and all, but if these files are temporary, why is it taking up permanent space on your hard drive? These files may seem small and harmless, but unless you clean them out, they will start to grow in size over time and start to dampen your computer’s performance.

Click the Start button and go to Programs, Accessories, System Tools and select Disk Cleanup. A display of temporary files will pop up on the screen. Check on each box and click OK.