How to Clean Up Hard Drives on a Computer

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Dave Andrews. Today I'm going to show you how to clean up hard drives on a computer. Let's go to our computer. And as you can see, on my desktop I have a bunch of files on there that are really just cluttering up the desktop and if I opened up my hard drive, let's say if I go to my documents here, I've got just a whole bunch of files that, you know, they might be old, they're copies, don't need them anymore. So, basically I'm going to show you how you can clean all of this up. Now, it's very very simple. Windows provides a delete method that will actually delete files and the good thing about this delete method is that it does not automatically permanently delete files. It moves them into sort of a trash bin type of thing. So, I'm going to start with my desktop here. Basically, let's say I don't want this copy of a document here. All I have to do is click on it to highlight it and on my keyboard on my computer I'm just going to press that delete key. It's going to ask me if I'm sure I want to remove that to the trash bin or recycle bin and I'm going to say yes. As you can see, that copy of the document has disappeared. Now, if I wanted to do multiple documents at once, I can hold down my mouse and drag a little selection box over all of these files and yet again just press the delete key on my keyboard. As you can see, those files have been removed. Another way to delete files is to actually click and drag them onto the recycle bin. That will actually delete them and move them into recycle bin. I'm going to do that with this one also. And as you can see, my desktop is now a whole lot cleaner. I can do the same within my documents. If I want to delete these several copies of my budget document here, I would just select them and since I have three of them I want to select multiple ones. Now, to select multiple ones hold down your control key and just click on each one that you want to select. Now, as you can see they're each highlighted in blue here. Now, I'll just the press the delete key and it's telling me I'm going to move three items to the recycle bin. I just want to clear them off and say yes. Now, let's say I wanted to delete everything in this folder. I didn't need any of this anymore or in the sub-folders. Hold down your control key and press "A" for all and that will select all of the documents in this folder. With those selected, just press delete. It's going to warn you that you're moving sixteen items. Say yes and those items are now deleted. My name is Dave Andrews and I've just showed you how to clean up hard drives on a computer."