How to Clean Up Unnecessary Files

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Michael Burton with Michael Burton Films.org, located in Salt Lake City, Utah. We're here talking about how to use MicroSoft Windows. What I want to talk to you about now is how to clean up unnecessary files on your computer so that you can save more space. Let me start out by saying that Windows XP us a registered trademark of MicroSoft, and I am in no way affiliated with MicroSoft. To clean up unnecessary files on your computer, the best way to do this is by opening your start menu. Under your control panel, you'll find this option. You'll see a number of categories here that you can choose from. You've got Appearance and Themes, Networks and Internet Connections, Add or Remove Programs, Sounds, Speech Devices, and Performance and Maintenance. Of course, cleaning up your files is a performance and maintenance issue, so we're going to go here. If you scroll up a little ways, you'll notice that there is a link here called Free Up Space on Your Hard Disk. This is what you're going to want to click on. Once the selected drive window pops up, you can actually choose which drive you want to select. Here we've got a number of drives, I've actually got my C and my D hard drives. Each are 250 gigabytes in size, and I only want to, right now, clean up my C drive. So then, we're going to click Okay, now we just wait for a minute. Hopefully this won't take too long. Sometimes it does, it depends. What it's doing right now is calculating how much space that we'll be able to free up. It's looking at...if you look here, compressing old files, so not only compressing files, but deleting unnecessary files that you don't need on your computer. So, hopefully this will just take a second, here. Okay, as we can see, it has brought up the disc cleanup for HP Pavilion. These are our results. Okay, I'm going to bring this to the center. This is showing up exactly how many files that we technically don't need on our computer. Showing here that we have 416 KB of downloaded program files, 9,000 KB of temporary internet files, and so on. Looks like we also have some stuff right here in the recycle bin that we can check to delete. We have some set up logs, some temporary files, and the compressing files, we have 33,000 KB of files that can be compressed to save us space. So we've gone ahead and highlighted all those. You can click on View Files, here , if you want to view the individual files, but I don't need to. I know that Windows is pretty good at choosing the files that we don't really need on here. So I'm going to go ahead and click Okay. It says "Are you sure you want to perform these actions?" Yes, we do. Now, if you wait just a moment, it will start to compress these files. When it's done compressing the old files, it will move on to deleting the files from the temporary internet and the other log on files. The reason why disc cleanup is so important to your computer system is that there's a lot of files that get downloaded, especially into your temporary internet, or your temp files, that are stored onto your computer that just take up space, that you don't really need. And what this causes, one is obviously lack of space. But it also causes your system to run a little bit slower, especially when you're adding and deleting other files. You're going to leave gaps in between your files, which is where defragmentation comes in handy. But if you don't defragment that often, your computer's going to start to have glitches, it's going to have...start to run slower. So the disc cleanup utility is a very important tool, and, but simple to use, that will really help your system if you do it on a regular basis. You can even set your disc cleanup to run at certain times, like, basically as a scheduled task. As you can see down here in the Performance and Maintenance window, there's a link called Scheduled Tasks. You can actually go in and schedule your disc cleanup to come on at certain times. I usually perform the disc cleanup right before the defragmentation. That way you get rid of any unnecessary files before you start defragmenting and getting rid of the gaps. It looks like this is going to take a little while, so we're going to go ahead and cancel this out, but that's basically what it would do is, it would come up and show us that everything's been cleaned off our computer, and that we're..we have a little bit more free space on our computer to use."