Organizing and Cleaning Your Computer

As much as possible, I keep my home neat and tidy. Living in an unkempt environment can be rather detrimental to one’s mental state (it does for mine). It’s the same for my computers (I have a few at home). I like my files neatly organized and categorizing to their right placements. An example – Adobe Reader setup folder sits in another folder called Software. There are many reasons that can cripple a computer, slowing it down and getting it inefficient. One of the main reasons is disorganization.

Disk Organizing and Cleanup

If you stay in a big house, chances are you accumulate more unnecessary items. The same theory can be applied to accumulation of files and folders in a computer. Ultimately the best way is to do proper organizating and cleaning up of your computer disk.

The purpose of organizing the files and folders in your computer is to ensure you can find what you want to easily. I seldom rely on the search function MS Windows come with. For a simple fact, it is very time consuming searching for a file when you need it very badly.

Cleaning up my computer is semi-automatic with the Disk Cleanup utility. This tool is in wizard based and gives you the option to select individual drives or disk. Wizard based, MS Windows gives you the information to help decide to keep or not to keep. This process should be done periodically and you will find significant improvement when the computer performs its functions.

Add or Remove Programs

While organizing and cleaning up the files in your computer can help you get rid of unnecessary files, it may be necessary to clean out some unnecessary programs too. This can be done using the Add or Remove Programs utility in Windows Control Panel. Add or Remove Programs lists all of currently installed programs along with an option to uninstall (if any) them.

If there are programs listed no longer required, simply highlight the program and click the uninstall (if any again) button. Windows will then begin the process to uninstall the program. After uninstallation, Windows will prompt to restart computer if required. However it’s still advisable to restart even when not prompted.

Defragment

In a computer, the files that are saved are placed on the hard drive. They are placed according to the time that they were saved. For example, if you open a word document and save the file as A.txt and subsequently open another document and save it as B.txt, B.txt is saved after A.txt. This is fine, but if you open A.txt later and a save was done, the added information is saved next to B.txt

Imagine having the computer to hunt the pieces of files down and piecing them together to form a complete file for you to access. The speed of processors are so fast now that it’s difficult to feel the slowness. Still, perform disk defragmentation on a regular basis is good practice.

Registry Cleaning

If you’re not familiar with MS Windows or its registry, I’d suggest you steer clear of this option. The Windows registry is really a database which stores settings and options for MS Windows operating systems and screwing it up can spell disaster for your MS Windows.

However if there’s really too much rubbish in the registry, try using Registry Fix tool which can also do the job as well as doing it properly and clearly.

I’ll stop here today. Hope the topic of Organizing and Cleaning Your Computer gives you an insight of what goes on inside.