Six Steps for Cleaning Your Hard Drive


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It is quite common for computers these days to have several terabytes of hard drives along with hundreds gigabytes of fast SSD. Hard drives are meant as the primary storage area, while SSD is typically filled with programs or commonly accessed files. Even with terabytes of storage, you may run out of space soon, if you are not careful. You need to do the following:

  1. Monitor your programs: Eventually, you will have dozens of programs and games installed in your PC. However, many of them are no longer required. You may use a program only once. If you use a program very rarely, it’s better to uninstall it and reinstall when you really need it.
  2. Use system maintenance tool: This tool should offer various maintenance tasks, including checking for junk and duplicate files. It may also get report on programs that you haven’t used more than one month. Then, you can decide which program that you should uninstall, especially if takes up a lot of space. To open the system maintenance tool, type in ‘trouble-shooter’ in the search box. Junk files may include TEMP files or unfinished downloads.
  3. Use uninstaller: Check Windows uninstaller regularly to check the list of programs. If you have been installing more than a few programs lately and you start to forget about them, then it’s a good idea to regularly check your programs. When uninstalling a program, you should also make sure to remove registry entries, so your registry can be kept simple and smaller.
  4. Use junk file cleaner: Junk files are never used and they will consume space in your storage units. Junk files could be left after downloading and installing a program. After you install a program, it may not be necessary to keep the installation package files in your hard drive. By scanning your hard drive with junk file cleaner, removal should be relatively simple. Identifying junk files can be difficult, because they may have long and random file names.
  5. Use Disk Cleanup: Disk Cleanup is a Windows utilities that can remove remaining junk in your hard drives. You can use it to remove downloaded programs, thumbnails and temporary files. After streaming a video, the video file may still be kept in your hard drive. Disk Cleanup will make a list of candidate files that should be removed. You can open this utility by typing ‘disk cleanup’ in the search field. Choose components that you want to clean up. You can check the boxes, click OK and start removing excess files.
  6. Use recently updated antivirus: Malware and viruses don’t only disrupt the smooth operations of your computer. They can also make plenty of duplicate data. A reliable antivirus program will delete replicated data and viruses. Often, after completely eradicating viruses in your computer, you can regain a few gigabytes of lost space. Check latest news about the most reliable antivirus programs, based on recent studies. Install the program and update it immediately. Scan your computer with the “Thorough” option to fully clean up your system.