delete, delete, backup, delete, save, delete, delete..... (about sums it up)
I spent a (un)happy several hours last night logged onto my son's PC and tearing my hair out. He's got an interview Friday and had a couple of (very simple) questions he had to have an answer for as part of the interview. A simple Google search would have provided the answer if he could have been bothered or thought about it... but no, he wanted ME to do it for him....
"Well it's about time you did this sort of research yourself son. Look it up!" says I (well you can't keep wiping their backsides for them.... He's 20 years old for gawds sake...!!!)
Half an hour later I called up "Have you done that yet?" No response... up to his room and he's just staring at the screen and the PC is doing nothing apart from whirring noisily...
"How long's it been like that?" "oh...weeks"
Give me strength............I took over the controls of his PC for the first time in a couple of years and the hard drive was just jammed with cra*. 1000s of music files, photos, duplicated programmes, all with no concept of file structure. 1000's of temp internet files..
Hours later having saved his music and photos to external hard drive on his ponderously slow PC the first task was to clear out forgotten programmes (unused stuff... )
QUOTE
1. Click Start, and then click Control Panel.
2. Click Add or Remove Programs.
3. Scroll through the list and examine each program. Windows XP lists how often you use a program and what day you last started it. Select programmes that haven't been used for yonks and remove them. You'll be surprised how many may be on there consuming a lot of disk space. You shouldn't remove anything labeled as an Update or Hotfix, however, because they improve the security of your computer.
4. Click each program you no longer need, click the Remove button, and then follow the prompts to uninstall it.
Now you've got rid of some unused software, get rid of the cra* that's cluttering up space on the drives
QUOTE
1. Open My Computer, right-click Local Disk (C: drive or whatever), and then click Properties.
2. On the General tab, click the Disk Cleanup button. Disk Cleanup will spend a few minutes examining your disk.
3. The Disk Cleanup dialog box opens. It'll tell you how much space on your pc it could free up.
4. Select the desired check boxes in the Files to Delete list, and then click OK. Disk Cleanup will spend several minutes clearing space.
5. If you have more than one hard disk, repeat this process for each hard disk listed in My Computer.
Empty the recycle bin and then tidy what's left up by defragging.
QUOTE
1. Open My Computer, right-click Local Disk, and then click Properties.
2. On the Tools tab, click Defragment Now. The Disk Defragmenter opens.
3. Click your first hard disk, and then click Defragment. Disk Defragmenter will work for at least several minutes, though it may take several hours.
4. If you have more than one hard disk, repeat this process for each hard disk listed starting at Step 3.
After defragmenting the hard drive you may notice Windows and other programs start about 20% faster
That's a starter for ten anyway.