As each year passes and we all get larger and larger hard drives, both internal and external, do you ever stop to take a moment to actually go back to the older files to see if you actually still need any of those things? Or are you just lugging them around, like files in a filing cabinet, because you either don’t want to tackle it or simply have no clue where to start. Or do you do like me, and just hold on to everything until that drive eventually fails and you lose the useless stuff along with anything still useful…
Modern technology has simplified lives in many ways. But when we were dealing with stacks of paper all the time, we were often a lot more likely to eventually sort through the chaos and get rid of things. Now when it’s just a little blip in your hard drive, barely taking up any space at all, you have little motivation to clean out all files. This can be even more problematic if you take a lot of photos but never really completely sort through them all. I’m especially guilty of this, knowing full well that any of the good ones I’ve pulled into Lightroom already — but maybe, just maybe, for some odd reason I might need a bad, blurry photo taken by accident. Right? 😉
A sure sign that you’ve got to take action is not only a slow and sluggish computer (especially at startup) but the red line of death, which goes a little something like this:
Cause let’s be honest; very few of us are proactive enough to take action before it become imperative. We procrastinate, usually because we have 100 other things to do as well, and then it ends up coming down to the wire — kinda like doing your taxes every year.
So I’ve decided that this week, while I’m sitting on the couch in the evening, letting myself recover from our run and otherwise just relaxing, I’m going to empty out my PC. Is my life going to end without doing this? Probably not. But I’m certainly going to be able to operate a lot better with my hard drive in my laptop not on the verge of collapse. Who knows, maybe it will even help it live a little longer.
What to look for when you purge PC files
- Unused programs — A good place to start when trying to free up space is useless programs. They may be things you installed for a singular purpose that you never use anymore or that came preinstalled on your computer. Either way, go right through the Start Menu or Control Panel to get those useless things off your computer and you just might free up more space than you imagined.
- Temp Files — Did you download a program or open a bunch of Word Documents that just saved in the world of temp files? You probably don’t need any of those any our hard drive anymore, and they can also easily by purged in Windows. Go to My Computer or Windows Explorer, and right-click the letter associated with your hard disk (usually C:). Click Properties, and then click Disk Cleanup.
- Old Files — There are probably a bunch of files you haven’t used on your computer in ages. But before you read through all your old documents and spreadsheets, start with the big stuff first. Movies you’ve downloaded are going to take up the most amount of space. If you still need them, you might want to move them to an external hard drive (but do remember that they are not always 100% stable), burn them onto disks or move them to a cloud drive online. Then you can have a look through music files to see if everything you have in your files are things you actually listen to. We all know that if you buy a CD, you rarely like all the songs on it. Once that is complete, you can start looking for old documents. Do a Search to find things that haven’t been modified in the last year or longer, then in the last 6 months. If you haven’t touched the files in that amount of time and they aren’t business-related, you probably don’t need them anymore.
Are you struggling with a slow and sluggish computer? Try these tips instead!
Do you do a regular purging on your PC? Or do you just replace it when it gets to be a problem? 😉
