Keeping your hard drive clean is important in maintaining computer performance and running speed.  Follow these simple steps to clean your computer’s hard drive:

1. To start, do a Windows Update on your laptop.
2. Go to the Start menu, All Programs, Accessories, and in System Tools, select the Windows Update option.
3. Make sure you get all available security updates.
4. To make sure automatic updates are on, go to your Control Panel.
5. Select Performance and Maintenance.
6. Go to System.

While You’re at it, Clean up Your Temporary Files
While you’re in the Control Panel, select Internet Options.  Delete temporary files and cookies to clear up disk space.  Also, going to the Start menu and selecting Search, if you select All Files and Folders and type “tmp” and search.  Delete all temp files on your computer.  When you’re done, empty the recycle bin.

Disk Checks, Defragmenting, and Computer Clean Up
Next, perform a disk check, defragment, and disk cleanup on your hard drive.  To do this:

1. Go to My Computer.
2. Right-click on the C: drive, select properties.
3. On the General tab, next to the pie chart showing how much disk space you are using, click the Disk Cleanup button.
4. When the cleanup is done, delete the suggested files and empty the recycle bin again.
5. Still in the properties for the C: drive, select the Tools tab.
6. In turn, perform the Error Checking option and the Disk Defragment option.

Keeping Your Computer Clean
Perform this simple system cleanup to leave your PC running more smoothly by clearing up disk space and correcting errors on your hard disk.  Avoid the need to clean your computer in the future when you download and utilize a good registry cleaner.  The registry cleaner will perform many of the tasks you had to do manually with a system cleanup.

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If you’ve had your computer for more than a couple of months, you’re probably at the point where you want to speed up loading time for your programs or your computer in general.

Defragment your hard drive.

It’s easy to defragment your hard drive–and this can really speed up loading for your files, programs, and operating system.  Fortunately, this is just about the easiest maintenance you can perform on your computer.

• Click on the Start menu.
• Select “Accessories” (you may have to click on “All Programs” to see this).
• In the Accessories menu, select “System Tools”
• Click on the Disk Defragmenter
• Run it!

Do this at least once a month.  If your computer sees heavy use, go ahead and run it every week or two, even if it tells you that you don’t need to.  This will speed up loading for everything on your computer and help keep it running smoothly.

Root out all spyware from your system!

These days, spyware is just a fact of life for most people.  It doesn’t have to be.

Spyware eventually appears on most computers as a way for advertisers to keep track of various marketing information.  Some spyware is actively dangerous to your computer, while other spyware “merely” slows your computer down.

There are a variety of anti-spyware programs on the market today. Some offer free versions, while others are free (with a donation box, of course!)

Download one or two of these programs and run them every week or so.  Every time you catch and delete a new spyware program, you’ll be glad you did.

Make sure your registry is clean and in good working order.

Spyware, adware, and other malicious programs can leave errors on your computer that anti-spyware and anti-virus programs do not remove. These problems usually reside in the Windows registry, which is a routing database for all the “action” files for all of your programs.

Malicious programs often leave behind their malicious traces in this database, as anti-spyware and anti-virus programs do not also act as registry cleaners.

In addition, this database can become cluttered and damaged from a variety of factors over time.

A cluttered, damaged, or out-of-date registry is the most common culprit for slow-loading, slow-running computers.  Most reputable registry cleaners offer free scans to anyone interested.  Speed up loading times on your computer by scanning your computer today!

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For those of us with Windows laptops, we’ve all experienced some sort of lag or decrease in performance.  With a few simple steps, you can take action and make your laptop run faster, improve laptop performance, and optimize overall runtime.

Perform a Windows Cleanup:

1. Go into My Computer
2. Right click on the C: drive
3. Select properties
4. Under the General tab, select the Disk Cleanup option.
5. Under Tools, select Error Checking and then Disk Defragment in turn.
6. Empty the recycle bin
7. Delete temp files off your computer by going to the Start menu
8. Selecting Search, All Files and Folders
9. Search for “.tmp” files
10. Delete all temp files your computer finds to clear up disk space

Protect your Computer:

By downloading a good virus scan/blocker and a good computer screen for other malicious programs, you can clean and protect your computer from viruses, malware, adware, Trojans, hackers, and a list of other malicious programs.

Clear Hard Drive Space:

An efficient and fairly low-cost way to clear up hard drive space, as opposed to buying a larger hard drive for your laptop, is to buy a USB drive (4G or higher is best).  Transfer any multimedia files (pictures, rarely used documents, music) onto the USB drive. Then delete the files from your computer, empty the recycle bin, and run a disk defragment.

All of these steps will help optimize your laptop and make it run faster.  On top of these tips, downloading and using a good registry cleaner will also help speed up your computer and help you avoid harmful laptop freezes/crashes caused by registry errors on your hard drive.

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You have had your PC for a while, and lately you have noticed it slowing down. If you have never run any of the include Windows diagnostics, you may be causing your own problem inadvertently.  These three little tools can help you bring your machine back up to speed in no time at all.

Defrag the Computer
If it has been some time since you ran a defragmentation of your hard drive, or worse, you never ran one, this is the time to do it.  Defragmenting a drive helps it retrieve data more efficiently and quickly.

When you save, your computer dumps files anywhere there is room on the hard drive.  Later, when it goes to retrieve them, it has to pull them together from all over the place.  If you run the defragmenter, it will pull common files together reducing the time it takes to search for them later.

This diagnostic can take some time if you have a very large or very full hard drive.  It is best to “set it and forget it.”  Select a time and day each week that you are most unlikely to be using your computer and let your PC defrag to its heart’s content without it affecting you at all.  This will help speed up data retrieval.

Try a Scandisk
If you have started to see error messages when you boot up and shut down, you have probably developed some problems in the operating system.  It is normal for these things to happen over the life of a computer, but running scandisk will allow your PC to search out the errors and find solutions before they become critical.

There are times when scandisk can’t run because you are using certain programs.  If that is the case, it will offer to run itself later when you shut down the computer.  Let it do so.  A clean, fully functional operating system is faster.

Backup
Truthfully, backing up your files won’t do much to speed up your computer unless you remove files you aren’t using regularly.  Things like photos take up a ton of space on a hard drive.  When your hard drive gets too full, it runs slowly.  By backing up data to another drive, CD, or an external drive, you speed up your system.

Pair Up Windows Diagnostics with Registry Cleaner
A registry cleaner is a utility you can download in a few minutes that takes care of cleaning up your hard drive for you.  It searches out errors in the operating system and fixes them if possible.  Download a registry cleaner along with running Windows Diagnostics as a part of regular maintenance.

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When your computer has slowed down to the point that you can no longer get things done efficiently, it is time to consider doing a Windows cleanup.  Windows, the operating system behind most PCs in the country, is a wonderful program, but many things can conspire to slow it down.  Some of these problems can be addressed by your run of the mill user.

1.    Defragment Your Hard Drive
In theory, you should be able to utilize the entire hard drive.  In reality, once your hard drive is at 80% capacity, more or less, it starts to slow down.  The first thing you can do is defragment the drive.  Some computers come with a utility for defragmenting, others don’t.

To manually defragment a drive:

• Open the My Computer folder.
• Select the hard drive.
• Find “properties” and right click upon it.
• On the tab marked tools, click “Defragment Now” to begin the operation.

Files that are scattered about the hard drive take longer to find, slowing down your operations.

2.    Remove Old Programs, Cookies and Temporary Internet Files

• Next, go to the Control Panel.
• Find the Add/Remove programs icon.
• Click upon it and let it generate a list of all the programs on your hard drive.
• Eliminate all the unused programs.

3.    Internet Browser Clean Up

• Finally, open up an Explorer window.
• Click upon the tools icon.
• In the general tab, find the buttons that remove cookies and temporary internet files.
• Click them and let your machine remove all these unneeded pieces.

4.    Registry Cleaners
If you have accomplished the three tasks above and still have problems with a slow running PC, you should purchase and download a good registry cleaner.

Learn how to clean up Windows problems in the registry of your operating system.  They perform a Windows cleanup without your intervention or effort, resulting in a faster, more optimized machine.

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To optimize computer performance and keep your hard drive clean of any unwanted files, programs, or software, it is highly recommended to clean files such as temp files, Filecheck files, data files, and cache files from your hard drive.

When you purge (clean files from) your hard drive, it frees up needed space, removes unnecessary programs/files, and creates a cleaner, more organized hard drive.

Cleaning the Temp folder:

- Right-click on My Computer and select Explore
- Under My Computer, select and expand Local Disk (C:)->WINDOWS->Temp
- There may be anywhere from a few to very many files in this folder.  Select them all and delete them.

Searching for *.tmp files:

- Go to the Start menu
- Select Search, select All files and folders, type “*.tmp” in the All or Part of File box, and search
- When the search is over, select all .tmp search results and delete.

Emptying your Recycle Bin:

- First, open the Recycle Bin and make sure there are no files that you do not want deleted.  Then, right-click and select Empty Recycle Bin.  This will permanently rid your computer of all of the Temp and .tmp files you just deleted.

Defragmenting your hard drive:

- Go to: Start->All Programs->Accessories->System Tools and select Disk Defragmenter
- Choose to defragment your hard drive.  It is recommended to have all programs closed during this time and to leave your computer idle. It may take a few minutes to a few hours to perform this task, so it is recommended to perform it overnight.

In addition to defragging files, add a registry cleaner to clean files and optimize performance on a regular basis.  The quickest and easiest way to instantly clean files and all other registry errors is to run a registry cleaner before the problem gets out of hand.

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