How to Keep Your Computer Running Fast & Smooth

Video Transcript

"When you have a new computer you want to keep it running as efficiently as possible. Hi I'm Charles Stewart Jr. and I am going to tell you how to keep your computer running fast and smooth. The main thing with your computer that starts to make it slow down over time is a couple things. Some of it is applications becoming more memory and hardware intensive and your hard drive just filling up with stuff that you don't need. That's usually a big thing. If you have a small hard drive over time stuff will just start to accumulate and the fuller your hard drive gets the slower it is going to become because your computer is now taking longer to go through all that data to find what you are looking for. Because a lot of times it doesn't get put on the hard drive in a nice clean order it is kind of spread out so it has to find everything. So the less data on there the quicker it can search things and one of the quick and easy ways to do that is to first obviously everyone is on the internet all the time, that is one of the main uses for a computer. You are going to want to clean out your cookies because that will just start to accumulate like if you have gone over a year or two without cleaning it you'll be surprised at how much memory or how much hard drive that is taking up. The easiest thing to do is open up Internet Explorer or whatever browser you use, if you are using Firefox it is pretty much the same. You will go to tools and then Internet Options and then there is a button right there you click and you click on that to delete cookies and hit o'kay and it will go ahead and delete all the cookies out and you should be able to tell what a difference that has made. A good thing to do is if you go to My Computer and then just look up your hard drive it will tell you sometimes how much space is on it. Like this shows me that I have a total of 37 gigs, I've got 15 gigs free on there so my hard drive is now starting to run a little slower because I am starting to fill it up. Granted that is a small hard drive so it is even more important that I keep as much stuff off of it as possible. Another good thing to do is to run a cleaning program which comes with windows. You just go down to Start and then go to All Programs and Accessories and then you go down to System Tools and then you do Disk Cleanup. Again depending on how big your hard drive is and how much stuff is on there it can take anywhere from a minute to 15 minutes to scan your hard drive which mine since I don't have a lot of stuff on there, it is a fairly small drive, it will list everything that can be deleted. You just check the boxes of the stuff that you want it to clean out, most all of these things, it is designated by Windows that you can lose this information because it is not critical and it won't destroy the computer or the operating system. Once you have chosen that you can hit o'kay after you have clicked the files that you authorize it to delete and it will delete them and another good thing is to go through your hard drive and just look for stuff that you are not using any more and then it will delete it because again the more hard drive space you can free up the faster your computer is going to run. Also if you are not using programs that you might have installed and are not using, go through and uninstall those programs because that will start to free up some space and you should notice a bit of a difference in your computer as far as speed goes. That's it for keeping your computer running clean and smooth."