Organize Your Hard Drive

Organize Your Hard Drive

By Christina Freeman

If your computer is running slower these days, or freezes up when you have too many programs running, you might need to reorganize your hard drive.

Go to “My Computer”

Right click on “C Drive”

Go to “Properties”

If your free space is less than your used space, it is important that you make sure you are maximizing your computer’s performance by cleaning up your disk. Here is a list of ten ways to clean up, organize and save space on your computer’s hard drive.

1. Save space on your hard drive: Disk Clean Up

Click on “Disk Cleanup.” After this function has scanned your computer for available space, it will present you with another dialogue box. Here, you can view the files that are currently available to be deleted without causing problems on your system. These types of files include: Temporary Internet Files, Recycle Bin and can even compress your older files. If it says, “You can safely delete these files” definitely check mark these items. After check marking the files you want to delete, click on “Clean up.”

2. Save space and organize your hard drive: Defrag your Computer

In the “Properties” dialogue box that you checked out by right clicking your “C Drive” folder, go to the “Tools” tab. Click on the “Defrag Now” button and your computer will analyze the space and information on your hard drive. Nothing will be deleted, but your computer will maximize all the information it has on it by reorganizing the files.

3. Save space on your hard drive: Delete old or unused Program Files

Go to your control panel; Open up the folder entitled, “Add or Remove Programs.” Your computer might take a couple minutes to list your currently installed program files. Do not delete any program that you aren’t aware of its use.

4. Save space on your hard drive: Invest in an external hard drive

External hard drives are a great resource for anyone and everyone. They provide a great way of saving space on your computer by allowing you to transfer old, rarely used files that you may want to access later, onto another hard drive that will store them safely.

5. Save Space on your hard drive: Zip it up!

Zipping up your files is basically a way of compressing your files into very, very small files, while keeping them easily accessible if you ever need them. You can get a free version of this program at:

WinZip Archive Utility

The evaluation version will work fine.

Good files to zip up are documents and files that are important, but you do not need to access very often. Take the files you don’t need to use all the time, zip them up into pertinent folders, and delete the originals.

6. Save Space on your hard drive: Save onto Data Disks

Saving files onto data disks is not the ideal scenario, as you can’t really fit all that much onto them, and they cost money. Personally, if you were going to purchase data disks, and go through the trouble of transferring files onto them, it would be better to invest into an external hard drive.

7. Save Space on your hard drive: Music Files

Music files take up a ridiculous amount of space on your computer. By transferring these files onto an external drive, zipping them up, or burning them all onto data disks you will free up an exorbitant amount of space.

8. Organize your Hard Drive: Delete Files from your Desk Top

Having too many files on the desk top of your computer can feel cluttered and obtrusive. It will also help you to access the files more intuitively and stay organized.

9. Organize your Hard Drive: Bookmarks

Open up your bookmarks, and properly title, organize in folders, delete unused links and view all your bookmarks.

10. Organize your Hard Drive: Delete, Rename and Organize your Folders

On your computer, the top tier of folder should be: My Documents, My Pictures, My Music, Program Files, Temp, and Windows (or whatever operating system name or designation is here.) Also, by doing this, you might find folders and/or files that you can safely delete. DO NOT delete any files or folders within your windows or other operating system directory.