Have you noticed that your computer seems to be slowing down as time goes on?

There can be a number of reasons for this, one of them being failure to keep on top of some basic housekeeping. If the terms ‘Disk Cleanup’ and ‘Defrag’ (defragment) don’t mean anything to you then the following should help you to speed things up on a Windows operating system.

In the background computers are forever creating temporary files and a lot of other clutter that doesn’t always get deleted. Due to the nature of the way things work, other files are getting split into pieces and put on different parts of the disk - fragmented. This means that the computer has to do a lot more work to retrieve those files when needed.

Two simple operations performed every couple of weeks should help keep things running smoothly.

Disk Cleanup

Time taken, about 5 mins.

1. Click on the ‘Start’ button at the bottom left of the screen and select ‘My Computer’ from the menu.

   

2. This opens another window that shows various devices, including the disks on your computer. Right click with the mouse on the C: drive and select ‘Properties’ from the menu that appears, (if you have other ‘Local Disks’ they can be done later). This will open up the following:

   

   After pressing the ‘Disk Cleanup’ button, the computer works out what savings can be made

   

3. Then the following dialogue appears - you will probably want to select all of the tick-boxes.

   

   Up until this point you have not changed anything. Now click ‘OK’ and the process will start. How long it takes depends on how much clutter you have, but we are generally talking a few minutes.

See the next page for how to defragment your disk.

Pages: 1 2