April Tech Tip: Habits and free software available to help clean up your files

April 18th, 2017
April Tech Tip: Habits and free software available to help clean up your files

Disk Space is often overlooked when it comes to long term PC health. Many are not aware that there are many different programs, and even Microsoft itself, put a good deal of temporary files that fill up a hard drive unnecessarily. Fortunately, there are habits and free software available to help clean up those unnecessary files and make room for the important files.

Viewing your Hard Drive: A handy, free tool for viewing your entire hard drive and where exactly the most space is being use is a tool called TreeSize. Treesize will scan your hard drive and tell you exactly how much space each and every folder is taking up. For example: This tool can help identify that a My Pictures folder is taking up a significant portion of the hard drive and that those pictures would need to be moved to an external hard drive to make room for more pictures! Treesize can be downloaded, for free, at: http://www.jam-software.com/freeware/

Clearing out Temporary Internet Files

Clearing out Temporary Internet Files: While browsing the internet, all the pictures and websites are cached on your hard drive for quicker viewing on a return visit to a website. Over time this, if never cleaned up, can take up a significant portion of space on a hard drive. There are many other temporary files on a Windows computer that should also be regularly cleaned up and to make it easy, we can you a program called CCleaner. CCleaner, with one press of a button, automatically scan a drive and find all those temporary files and clean them up! CCleaner can be downloaded, for free, at: https://www.piriform.com/ccleaner/download/standard

Removing Old Programs

Removing Old Programs: One of the biggest users of space are, of course, the programs you run on the drive! Sometimes, with programs that we no longer use, we forget to remove them from our hard drive. Making a regular practice of reviewing your installed programs and uninstalling the ones that are no longer in use can make a hard drive last significantly longer! In windows 10: Go to Settings > Apps & Features to review all install programs. Clicking on a program will give you the option to uninstall the program and free up the allotted space.

 

Tech Tip Provided By:
Mike Moore, NOC Engineer


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