Spring Cleaning your PC.
Well it’s almost Spring and time for the annual clear out. Just like houses, computers can fill up with unwanted applications and rubbish files over time. Now would be a good time to give your PC a good spring clean.
Start off by looking through your applications. Are there any trial versions of software still installed on your PC that you are no longer using? If so, remove them. Are you possibly running two different Anti Virus clients? If so, remove one of them as having two Anti Virus clients on your PC is just a bad idea. Next, open up your internet browser of choice. How many toolbars have you running? More than one? If so, I’d suggest you disable and uninstall all but your must frequently used one. To be honest, I don’t bother with any of them, not even the Google Toolbar.
Another area to look at cleaning up is your Desktop. Too many people use it as a dumping ground for files. I would suggest moving the files from the Desktop to their respective folders. Images should go in to the My Pictures folders. Word, Excel, PDF files and other such Documents into the My Documents. Not only will this help when doing a backup of your files (you are doing a backup of all your files aren’t you?), it will have an impact on the speed of your PC.
If you are not doing a backup of your PC, I would suggest you start soon. As I have said before, too many people only realise the importance of backups when their PC dies and they lose their documents and photos. It’s not nice to tell people they’ve lost all their images of the grandchildren, but it happens. Buy a USB Drive big enough to contain a backup of your important data. Backup is built in to Windows and is easy to set up. When your PC dies, and it will eventually, you will delighted you did.
The last piece of advice for this month is to use Disk Cleanup every month or so. Disk Cleanup can be found under System Tools in Windows. For information on how to use Disk Cleanup, open up the following link in your internet browser: http://goo.gl/7DyRU
So, that’s our quick and easy guide to giving your PC a good Spring Cleanup. If you have any questions about the article above, feel free to contact us.
