How to Clean My Hard Drive

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Dave Andrews. Today I'm going to show you how to clean your hard drive. Let's go to our computer. As you can see on my desktop, I have a whole lot of files and documents on there that I really don't use any more, really don't need... they've just built up over time, and I want to get rid of all those. Now I can click on just one of them here and all I have to do is press they delete button on my keyboard and then click yes and that button, that icon will disappear. Now if I want to get rid of more than one at once. I can just hold my mouse down and I can drag a box around all the files that I want to delete, press that delete button again. It's going to warn me that I'm moving multiple items this time to my recycle bin which I'll tell you about in a moment. I'm going to click yes. As you can see, those files that I had selected have been removed. I'm going to do so with the rest of these as well. Now, it's warning me that it's moving those to the recycle bin, so I need to talk to you a little bit about that. On your desktop you'll see an icon that says, "recycle bin." Just double click on that. This is basically a holding place for all the files that you've deleted and those files have not been removed from the hard drive entirely yet. This is just in case you accidentally delete something that you might need and want to restore back. And the way you do that is to click on it and then click on "restore this item." As you can see that item I had selected has been deleted... or restored rather. So I'm going to delete it again. Now to empty your recycle bin... let's say I don't need any more of these files any more, and to actually clean the drive up. Just clean on empty the "recycle bin" and then click "yes." Those files have all now been permanently deleted. Now, once you've deleted files you don't want, I'd suggest you click on your start button and then click on "my computer." Let's right click on our C drive and go to properties. And then let's go to the tools tab and click "defragment now." And you have to be an administrator on Vista, so click continue. Once again, click "defragment now." And what this is going to do is this is going to scan through your hard drive and it's going to put files in places where they can be accessed as fast as possible by your hardware. My name's Dave Andrews and I've just showed you how to clean up your hard drive."