After a long winter, who doesn’t like to do a little spring cleaning to keep things tidy? Don’t forget about your PC, though. After months of daily use, your PC is sure to be cluttered with stuff, and just like your home, it’s important to clean it up to keep things running smoothly and looking neat. Here’s a few tips for performing some spring-cleaning on your PC.
Clean Up Your Desktop
One of the most common offenses we see is a cluttered desktop. This is the screen you see every time you start your PC, and any time you don’t have programs up. It’s like your desk at work: the things you need to use every day should be there, and neatly arranged; everything else should be in file cabinets! Go through each item and ask yourself if it needs to be there. Things like program shortcuts, such as links to Outlook or Word, are good things to have on your desktop. They’re programs you use each day and want to keep handy. But emails, documents, or internet shortcuts that you haven’t touched in months? You should get rid of them. Most things on the desktop are just shortcuts to other locations (you really shouldn’t save things directly to the desktop!); they’re already “filed” away somewhere else.
Clean Up Your Inbox
Most people are running Microsoft Outlook, which is a great program for email, especially in a business setting. With lots of features and options, it’s a powerful tool. However, with all the email we send and receive every day, it doesn’t take long for our mailboxes to get very cluttered. Microsoft has made it simple to create folders, and even easier to search. With these two tools, you can create folders for specific contacts, and then search for any emails you’ve kept and move them to their appropriate folder. By doing so, you’ll get an idea of what’s important and what isn’t, and can simply delete the junk. Alternatively, if you get a lot of mail from a specific sender and don’t need it, you could simply search for their emails, select them all and delete all at once. Make sure you empty your Deleted Items folder regularly as well. Emails aren’t truly gone until deleted from the Deleted Items folder. A cluttered and over-sized mailbox can lead to slower performance and errors – keep things clean!
Organize Your Files
Like we mentioned above, your folders are like a file cabinet to keep your desktop clean. That doesn’t mean your file cabinets should be a mess, though. Go through your personal folders: My Documents, My Pictures, My Music, and look at the state of things. If you’ve got dozens or hundreds of loose files in each of these, it’s time to make some folders and organize things. Create folders in My Documents for specific contacts, or topics, or both; organize My Pictures by date or location; keep My Music separated by artists or albums; you get the idea! There’s no limit to the amount of folders you can create, and the folders themselves don’t take up space. All they help do is keep things neat and organized. Once you’ve organized the obvious stuff, you’ll still likely have some stragglers that didn’t fit anywhere – this is a great chance to look at these files and decide if they’re really necessary. If not, delete them and clear up the space.
Doing this sort of cleaning regularly will help keep your PC running like new. Of course, once you’ve done all this cleaning, you should empty your Recycle Bin from the Desktop, as it will likely be pretty full!
