Cleaning Junk Files

In order to keep your computer running as smooth as possible, it’s essential to carry out regular maintenance and cleaning your hard drive of all unwanted junk such as old programs, shortcuts, files and folders that are no longer used by you. Removing these files speeds up your computer as well as frees up more storage space on the hard drive.

In this article, we shall be demonstrating how to perform a cleanup using Windows’ Disk Cleanup, a free utility from Microsoft. However, please be advised that it’s an extremely slow process that could take anywhere from a couple of hours to half a day depending on the size of the drive, amount of data and other factors so we highly recommend that you use SlimCleaner Plus if you value your time as it does all this and more in a fraction of the time.

• Click Start > Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Disk Cleanup or you can simply click Start > Run and type cleanmgr in the window and click OK.
• In the window that pops up, select the drive you want to clean from the drop-down menu and click OK.
• You can also open ‘My Computer’, right-click on the drive you want to clean up, click on Properties. Click the General tab, then click ‘Disk Cleanup’.
• Now Disk Cleanup will analyze the drive you selected to determine how much space can be freed up. This process can take some time.
• Once the calculation is complete, a categorical list of files will be selectable by you. Don’t proceed with the options that are automatically checked. Instead, review each category of files up for deletion. Clicking on a category will display more information about that category in the ‘Description’ section of the window.

If you’re still not sure about deleting the files in a category after reading the description, click on the ‘View Files’ button and the complete list of individual files scheduled for deletion will be displayed in Windows Explorer. Here, you can move any files you want to save by dragging and dropping them to a safe location leaving the category selected. If you want every one of the files to be saved, just close the window and uncheck the file category to exclude it from the disk cleanup. Once you have reviewed all the categories, click OK to begin the cleanup.

Most of the unnecessary junk on your hard drive will be cleared by carrying out Disk Cleanup. However, following Disk Cleanup, a lot of empty spaces and gap will be left behind on the hard drive where there once were files. This is an ideal time to defragment your hard drive. Defragmentation is the reorganization of your hard drive into orderly sections in order to save time when the computer is searching for a file on the drive. Click here to find out how to defragment your hard drive.