Computers can get clogged up with old unneeded and unused files, pictures and lots of other stuff. Also storage devices, especially hard drives will get cluttered and fragmented. If one does not do some housekeeping, your computer will begin to slow down, and in extreme cases, I have seen them come to a complete stop. Then you will have a problem! Here are some helpful things you should do to keep your computer humming.

If you are running Windows 10 (you should be), put your mouse curser on the start button at the lower left of your home page, right click your mouse and choose File Explorer.

Search for This PC.

Look for the operating system drive. It will most likely be labeled OS (C:).

Right click on the OS (C:) icon and a drop down box will appear.

Left click on Properties at the bottom of the drop down box and a new box will appear with a lot of useful information. The first thing you should look at is how much of your hard drive storage you have used. If you have used more than 70% of your hard drive, it is probably time to look at deleting or offloading files and photographs to another storage device. An additional storage device may be attached to your computer in several ways. It could be easily attached by a USB cable, or if you have a desktop computer, there may be internal space to put your new storage device inside. This will require additional knowledge in purchasing a drive because you will need to know what kind of an internal interface your computer has and purchase the correct drive. For most people, a USB drive is the easiest way to go. Be sure to know what USB interface you have. Older computers may have a USB 1.1, USB 2.0, or the newer PC’s have USB 3.0. You may need to purchase an adapter. Fortunately, USB is downward compatible: USB 3.0 will work on any of the slower USB interfaces. Soon you will see a USB 4.0. It will still work with the older USB interfaces.

Next left click on the box labeled Disk Cleanup. This will bring up a box labeled Disk Cleanup for OS (C:). On the left of the cleanup box will be a checkmark for each item you probably no longer need on your hard drive. Scroll down through the items and get familiar with as many of them as you can. You can view some of them if you wish. After you get tires of that, choose OK to delete them. These are files the operating system has determined you no longer need. You can also see how much hard drive space each checked item will save.

One word of caution! You may be tempted to check the box labeled Compress This Drive to Save Disk Space. NEVER check this box! I wish Microsoft would remove it. This will compress your drive. What you are not told is: Your computer will slow down to a crawl and you will not be able to fix it. In order for a compressed drive to operate it will now need a lot of processor cycles to un-compress every instruction and piece of data to run. Worst of all, after you compress your hard drive, you cannot undo it; the process is NOT reversible. I know of someone who did this even after I told the person not to do it. It required a complete system restore.

Next click on Clean Up System Files. After you feel comfortable with the items selected, press OK. You have now probably recovered a lot of hard drive space.

Next go to the Start Button, right click on File Explorer, This PC, OS (C:), and open the tab at the top called Tools. All storage devices will become fragmented sooner or later. It is the nature of them. As data is changed (it usually gets larger), documents and pictures) will no longer fit in its original space. The data will need to be relocated to a new and larger space on the hard drive. The computer will generate forward and backward pointers to the new data location and back to the previous location, but now the drive has become fragmented. Your data is no longer sequential. Over time as the drive becomes increasingly fragmented, the computer will slow down. The way to fix this is to defragment a storage device and get everything sequential again. A tool called Optimize (or defragment in older Windows Systems) located under Tools. You can choose to run it immediately of automatically at one of the intervals under the Optimize function. If you have a computer, with a hard drive, I would set mine for Daily Optimize under the Schedule on the next screen. On older Windows operating systems, the process is still called defragment. If you have a solid state drive or SSD, I set my schedule for one week. The process on a solid state drive is called trimming.

Now that you know how to do this process manually, and where it came from, the latest Windows 10 has made this process simpler with a new interface. It’s time to go to the Start button in the lower left of your screen and select Settings, System, and then Storage. Now you will see how the latest version of Windows 10 has now put a new interface on the process, but it is still the same underneath this new facade.