How to Clean Up a Computer

The computer clean up is important for speeding up your computer. The speed of your computer decreases if you do not perform this maintenance routine. Sometimes, if it is a virus attack you may be at a higher risk. Bad sectors developed on your hard disk can prove to be dangerous as there are chances of losing the information or data stored in these sectors of the disk. There are five steps that can help you answer the question how to clean up your computer system.

How to Clean Up Your Computer - Disk Space
Firstly, freeing up you disk space is an important step. This will not only clean your computer, but also improve its performance. Many operating systems provide computer clean up tools. Freeing up the disk space includes deleting the internet history, which includes the downloaded file history and temporary internet files. Empty the recycle bin and temporary files that you never use. Also, the programs that you are not using currently must be uninstalled.

How to Clean Up Your Computer - Disk Defragmentation
When the computer stores data, it is stored in a fragmented form, which is scattered in different parts of the disk. The computer has to search for the whole disk in order to access a particular file. This introduces a delay in the access, which in turn degrades the overall computer performance. Defragmentation of disks is an essential part of your computer clean up procedure. Many computer clean up software applications have a defragmentation tool. This tool helps collect the fragmented files and consolidate them so that these files will be saved in contiguous memory locations on the disk. The speed of reading and writing files and folders to hard disk speeds up.

How to Clean Up Your Computer - Antivirus
The computer must always be kept protected from spyware. The viruses and worms collect your personal and confidential information from the computer. This can be risky as your confidential information like website username and passwords can be collected and misused. The spyware and computer viruses not only do this, but also they slow down your computer and affects the overall performance. A good antivirus software may help you to clean up your computer by deleting these unwanted viruses and worms.

How to Clean Up Your Computer - Bad Sectors
The disk defragmentation is not enough, the bad sectors in your hard disks also have an effect on the overall performance of the hard disk. The bad sectors on your hard disk can also make reading and writing on your hard disk. There are computer clean up software applications that scan your computer and check for any file system errors.

How to Clean Up Your Computer - Cookies, Registry and Startup
The cookies are small files that store information about the URLs of a particular website. These files can be accessed using a web browser and is somewhat similar to the internet history that is stored. You can retrieve the data from the website you have already visited using cookies. These cookies occupy unnecessary space in your hard disk. The cookies that are not important can be deleted during your clean up procedure.

The registry is the place on your hard disk where the computer stores information about the applications that are installed, documents that are created by this application, hardware on your system like the ports on your computer. Special registry clean up tools are available to clean up your computer. The startup programs are those programs which run when you boot your computer. Too many programs at the startup may affect your system performance. The duplicate files must be found out and deleted to clean up your computer.

These are some of the ways to clean up your computer and improve performance and speed of your computer. These were some of the guidelines on how to clean up your computer.