Cleaning Windows XP My Documents Clutter

Video Transcript

"Hi, this is Gerard Mainardi and today we're talking about how to organize your my documents folder on Windows XP. Now I'm not affiliated with Windows XP and remember that Windows XP is a trademark of the Microsoft Corporation. Now what we want to look at now is deciding what you want to keep and what you don't want to keep. This really applies to things like temporary folders where you're doing work or download folders where you might be getting a lot of things off the internet. Let's take a look again. Go up to start and go down to my documents. Let's take a look here inside, for example, my downloads folder. Now keeping your computer free of clutter helps it run better but it also helps to keep you more organized. Now, if you recall, we set up a folder for our downloads before here. If we go into it, we can see here's some folders, here's everything I have as you'll notice if you look right here by name. It's in alphabetical order right now like the rest of everything that I have. From A down to Z. Now this isn't very helpful for finding out what we want to keep and what we don't. Now what we can do is go over here. If you'll recall, we picked these up in the very beginning. And if you don't have these, right click on this top bar and check date modified and date created to on. As you can see, let's click on date created once and then twice. Now you'll see the little arrow here is pointing down right here. Now everything is in descending order. This is everything that I have from newest all the way down to oldest at the bottom here. New, the first thing I have here is the cam studio that I am using to capture this video. And then very far down at the bottom, here's some old things like some old gaming things that I downloaded a long time ago, an iTunes set up, which if you look at the date created here, I got back on 3/04/07. So you can see, I mean, I have iTunes installed now. Why am I keeping this? Really, no good reason. I shouldn't have this anymore. It's just taking up space. So let's stay organized here. Highlight the things that you don't want. Hit delete. Sure, send it to the recycle bin. Now another thing you can do is hold down control and check many files at one time. You can see I'm doing that right now. Now everything that you hold down control and click on is something you selected, and you can delete all of these at once if you hit the delete key. It usually asks not to delete them. Another trick that not everybody knows, highlight one file, hold down the shift key here, and as you can see now I've highlighted a file from the very first one I click on all the way down to the last one. If you hold down shift, you can continue clicking down all the way. Alternatively, you can go up like that. Anyways it's just important to keep old stuff gone if you don't need it anymore and that way, you have all the newest things available to you, keeps your computer running better, and definitely keeps you more organized."