[mack]

Originally Posted by butterflyblonde

If you click start, find accessories then system tools, you will find certain tools like disk clean up, disk defragmenter etc...

Using disk clean up is a handy way to clean up unnecessary files from your computer and should be done often.

If you open 'my computer' by double clicking the desktop icon or tracing to it from the start button, you should see a list of drives.

Look for the (C:) Drive , place your mouse over it and right click, then choose properties.
In the new box that opens you should see a 'tools' tab next to general.


When you click the tools tab you should see disk defrangmenter there and 'error checking' or you might just see checkdisk, scandisk.

Use scandisk first as it is better to run this before the defrag process. You should see 'check now' so click that and in the new box tick both boxes/make sure there is a tick present for ' Automatically fix file system errors' and ' Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors'.

Click start and a new box will inform you a scan can't be run while the PC is in use, you need to click 'schedule disk check' and close all boxes off. Then restart your machine and the scan will automatically run. Don't press anything, it make take quite a while if you have never run it before, but you will return to your log in screen after it has finished.

Then you can defrag by tracing to 'accessories', 'system tools' or by opening my computer again and right clicking the C drive icon, back to properties, tools again.

Just click defragment now, then the same again on the new box. Again, this process can take time, especially if you haven't been running it before. But you don't need to restart your machine for this as it runs while logged on.

Checkdisk will repair any errors and try to recover bad sectors that have occurred on your machine, fragmentation is caused by files associated with a particular program 'seperating or fragmenting' on your hard disk, so this process puts the files close together, this in turn will make your PC run more efficiently.

That was really nice of you bb to take the time to put down how to go about cleaning up a PC, it almost makes me want to buy one just to try your instructions... _ _