Is Your Computer Feeling Bogged Down?

We take our car in for routine maintenance, such as oil changes and tire rotations. We take our animals to the vet for their routine checkups and shots. We ourselves go to our doctors for routine checkups. But what about our faithful computer? Do we do enough routine maintenance to keep it running smoothly? Or do we take it for granted?

If you haven't done some basic maintenance on your PC lately, now's the time to do it. Here are a few steps that could help keep your computer running smoothly.

First, before you do anything, back up your computer. I've mentioned backing up a few times since I started writing my articles, and backing up your system is extremely important!

Second, delete and organize - e-mails first. Does your inbox have hundreds of e-mails in it? Organize it by creating separate folders for various topics and move those e-mails to their specific folder. (I have folders set up for each client.) Delete e-mails you don't need, then remember to "empty 'Deleted Items' folder". If you're running Outlook, you can also auto archive your older e-mails. In Outlook Express, this would be called Compacting.

Now for files. Go through your documents and delete files you don't need anymore. If you don't have any subfolders set up in your My Documents folder, now's the time to organize those files, as well. Create folders to organize your documents to. (I also have files set up for each client.) Then delete your Recycle Bin.

And lastly, those unused programs. Go to your add/remove programs and remove any programs you don't use. So you downloaded the latest and greatest Way To Make Money software program? And you only used it that one time, decided you didn't like and have never used it again? Remove it!

So now that you've done what you could to free up some space on your hard drive, let the computer do its part. Run the Disk Cleanup tool. There are lots of things that get stored on our computer that we're not even aware of that end up draining our computer's resources. Here are the steps to run Disk Cleanup:

- Click Start - Click My Computer - Right-click Local Disk - Click Properties - Under the General tab, click Disk Cleanup. - After it's finished examining your hard drive, the Disk Cleanup dialog box will appear. Select each of the check boxes in Files to Delete list, and then click OK. - When asked if you're sure you want to perform these actions, click Yes.

Disk Cleanup takes several minutes.

After you've ran Disk Cleanup, next is to defragment your hard drive. I like how Microsoft's website described it, so here it goes: "Sometimes, a newspaper article skips from the front page to somewhere in the middle of the paper. You have to stop reading the article and flip through the paper to find the page on which it continues. You could read the article much faster if it were printed out on a single page. "Files on your computer can either be fragmented, like newspaper articles, or unfragmented, like a book. Over time, more and more files become fragmented. When a file is fragmented, it takes longer for the computer to read it because it has to skip to different sections of the hard disk drive -- just like it takes you a few seconds to find a page in the middle of a newspaper."

To defragment your computer, follow these steps:

- Click Start - Click My Computer - Right-click Local Disk - Click Properties - Click the Tools tab - Click Defragment Now - Click on your hard disk drive, and then click Defragment - When prompted, click Close - Disk defragment could take several minutes or several hours, so best to do it at night when you're not working on the computer.

Another Quick Tip

You can discover how much hard drive space is available on your computer by clicking Start - My Computer - Right-click Local Disk - Properties. A pie graph will show you the amount of used and unused space for each of your drives. Check this often to keep an idea of how much space you are using.