Proactive PC Maintenance – Using Disk Cleanup

Disk Cleanup is a built in Windows utility that can clean the crud (old files, temporary files, recycle bin files etc.) from your computers hard disk drive, as well as compressing old, unused files. This all contributes to a leaner, faster PC because Windows will no longer have to search through the bad files to get to the good ones!

Temporary files are created on your PC for numerous reasons, including when you browse the internet, install programs, and by the operating system itself during normal use.

Using the Disk Cleanup Utility

To open the Disk Cleanup utility:

1. click on the START

2. then either PROGRAMS (WIN98/2K/Me) or ALL PROGRAMS (XP)

3. then ACCESSORIES, SYSTEM TOOLS & click on DISK CLEANUP

(NON-XP users or those with more than one hard disk drive/partition may be prompted to select the drive that you wish to cleanup. In most cases it will be the C: drive that you need to select)

A dialogue box appear [Calculating How Much Space...]

Once the utility has finished analysing your hard drive a new window will appear. In most cases it is OK to select (tick) all the boxes, however if there are any you are unsure of, then feel free to leave them as they are. You can check which files are which by clicking the VIEW FILES button.

When you have finished with your selections, click the OK button.

Disk Cleanup will then proceed to remove all the crud that you selected for removal.

NOTE:

After using Disk Cleanup, it is a good idea to use Disk Defragmenter to reorganise files on your hard disk drive, which will shorten seek (search) times.