Computer slow, empty out your hard drive

If you have noticed that, your computer is running slower than normal chances are you have a full hard drive. The chances of your hard drive being full actually increase the older your computer is and how much you download. For example, if you only download a few things every couple of months the chances of your hard drive being full are slim, but if you download something every day you have a much higher chance of your hard drive filling up.

The best way to get your computer to run faster is to free up space on your hard drive. The newer your computer is the more free space it is going to need in the hard drive so that it can run properly. With older computers, Windows 98 or older, you do not want to go lower than 500 megabytes, with newer computers because the hard drives are bigger that means you need to leave more space. Here are the steps you can take to clean up your hard drive to help your computer run faster.

Step one:
On your computer desktop, there is an icon called the "Recycle Bin: or "Trash can." Whenever you delete a file, picture, or anything else from your computer, it will end up in this area. Before you do anything else, you will want to empty out the recycle bin by right clicking on the icon and clicking on "Empty." By emptying out the recycle bin, you will be freeing up some of your hard drive. When emptying your recycle bin you want to make sure that there is nothing of importance inside, open the program to double check everything in there is trash.

Step two:
Now you will need to get rid of all your temporary internet files. You can find these files in the temporary internet files folder that is located in your hard drive under the windows program. When deleting these files make sure you only delete the files that end with .tmp because other programs used to store attachments that you downloaded in the same folder. You also need to look in other locations because you never know what programs saved copies or images of things that you created and forgot to delete, so look around and delete them all.

Step three:
You will also need to check the pictures that you have downloaded because they can take up a lot of space. If your hard drive is running out of space, you will want to burn the images to a CD, DVD, or even transfer them to a separate hard drive to help you free up space on your hard drive.

Step four:
Everybody at some point will download things onto their computer, whether it is a movie that you want to watch or videos that you find funny the downloads do nothing but take up space. What you need to do is once you have downloaded them you will need to watch them, and get rid of them as soon as possible. If it is something, you want to keep burn it to a DVD so that you have a copy of it that you can use later on. Downloads take up a lot of space on your hard drive and you never realize just how much space you have used because of how fast the downloads fill up the space.

Step five:
Clean out your cache folders, which is where temporary internet files will be stored. Firefox and Internet Explorer both store temporary internet files to help make your internet browsing faster. Majority of the time you will only free up 10 to 20 megabytes, which can help in a crunch, but won't make that big of a difference.

Step six:
You will need to install a variety of programs to help you remove spyware, adware, and Trojans. If your antivirus software does it for you that is great, but most often it will take more than one program to effectively remove everything. Be careful when choosing a program to install, you will want to check a computer security forum to find the best ones to use.