Spring is for cleaning. We humans rally through our homes pushing the junk out to garage sales. We clean our lawn mowers for a summer of use. We keep our cars a little cleaner. It’s good to include your computer in all this tidiness.

Your computer’s hard drive may have as much junk as that storage area in your basement. But there are some easy ways to clean it up.

Start by opening the Control Panel (Start/Control Panel) and then opening “Add or Remove Programs.” This is a list of all the programs windows knows about. Look for any that you no longer use, and remove them. If you’re not sure about a program, keep it for now. Restart your computer before moving ahead.

Next, let’s delete unnecessary temporary files. Windows creates these for a variety of reasons, but many aren’t truly temporary. Go to Start/Search/All Files and Folders, then enter “*.tmp, ~*.*” to look for all files ending with “.tmp” or starting with “~”. The start (*) serves as a wildcard for our search. Select Hard Disk Drive under “Look In” and click Search. It will take a little time to find all the files, so be patient. Once the search is done, start deleting the files. You can select a group of them by left clicking on the first one, then pressing shift and left clicking on the last of the your list. I then like to use shift and delete at this point because it skips putting the files in the Recycle Bin. Two words of caution. Don’t select more than 100 files at a time. More than that can drastically slow you down. Second, not all files will let you delete them. That’s OK. Skip the ones that won’t go away.

Now, let’s go after Internet files. Every time you browse a Web page, parts of the page get stored on your computer. To clean up these files, start Internet Explorer, then go to Tools/Internet Options, and click “Delete Files” in the Temporary Internet Files section.

The final step in periodic cleaning is to defragment your hard drive or “defrag”. Why defrag? Hard drives write data wherever they can find space. Files aren’t necessarily in one continuous string on your disk. Think of it like as groups of red, blue and yellow marbles dropped into a saucepan. Your nice, neat groups of marbles are scattered or fragmented. We want to regroup the marbles by colors, just as we want to bring files back into single pieces. Go to Start/Programs/Accessories/System Tools/Defragment to run Windows’ defrag tool. Watch as Windows reshuffles all the pieces of your files into nice, neat lines.

These few steps will help free up some hard drive space on your system, as well as give you a little performance boost. It’s a good idea to go through these periodically to keep your system lean and clean.

Reclaiming Drive Space

There are a couple advanced changes you can make to your Windows system to free up a little extra space on your hard drive. These only need to be done once.

In Internet Explorer, go again to Tools/Internet Options, but this time choose “Settings” in the Temporary Internet Files section. By default, Windows gloms onto 10% of your hard drive for these temporary files. I would move the slider down to the left so that the number on the right is about 500 MB. Click OK.

Next, on the Windows Desktop, right click on the Recycle Bin and select Properties. Windows again wants 10% of you drive for your Recycle Bin. That's more than you'll ever use, so move the slider down to 1%, then click OK.