Whether your computer is a few years old or brand new, you may notice that it’s not as fast as it once used to be. This can be due to any number of factors, but it helps to clean up your system every once in awhile. I’m not talking about spraying it with 409, but cleaning out the “junk” that accumulates the more you use your computer.
The biggest villain of the software world is Temp files. These files are created when installing programs, creating new documents, etc. Most of these files should have the decency to clean up after themselves, but like a teenage boy they seem to leave junk all over the place. So there is nothing left to do but clean them up yourself. You’re thinking, “I don’t know anything about software, how am I gonna do that?”
The easiest way is to go into This PC and choose the drive you want to clean up. Right click on C:, for example, and choose Properties. Click on the button that says Disk Cleanup. It will spend a couple minutes calculating and then it will suggest what you can cleanup. In most cases you can safely have it delete everything it finds. This will help, but probably didn’t get all your temp files.
The next thing to do is run a Search for files and folders and type in “*.tmp”, without the quotation marks. You should be able to safely delete everything it finds. Anything with the extension .tmp is a file you wouldn’t be able to open anyway. Now you will want to check and see if there are any remnants in your Temp folders. What? More Temp files? Well yes. Typically there is at least one Temp folder in Windows. The first place to check is on the root of C:. In other words, when you open up C: in This PC, look for a folder called Temp. If so delete everything in it, unless you specifically saved something there yourself. The last place to look for a Temp folder is under the Windows folder, also on C:. Once again anything in here can be deleted.
Next month we’ll talk about some other things you can do to speed up your pc.
Until next month…….Safe Computing!
Mike Fonseca
Fonseca Consulting Services
www.fonsecaconsultingservices.com
804-677-4825