Windows XP disk clean up

Can someone please tell me how to do a disk clean up. I really need to clean my comp.

 

Sure it is fairly simple. Click on My Computer, right click on your C drive, choose properties, and click on Disk Cleanup, make sure the various boxes have a checkmark in them ---and wait a while .

 

thankyou will the disk clean up like delete everything on my comp, or like what does it do?

 

MM, not really. It will remove your downloaded program files, your temporary internet files, your files in the recycle bin, your temporary files --none of which you need. And it will also compress old files.

 

Compress old files will often hang a PC. If it does, just close it out and run again without checking that option. Doesn't do much for disk space anyway, unless you're really hurting for it.

 

Don't forget to defragment your harddrive as well.

 

How do you defragment your harde drive?

 

When you get finished with the disk cleanup, look at the top of that window and find the tab named Tools. Click that and it takes you to another screen with some other things you can do including defragment.

 

Other option is to click on the start button, select Help & Support, and search for defrag. You should find a page with step-by-step directions.

 

okay thankyou

 

Also how come it takes so long? Its at 7% in 20 minutes.

 

The first time takes just this side of forever. The second time (assuming you don't wait a year or two) will go faster and by about the 10th time, it is pretty quick. Same with the disk cleanup.

The defrag program likes to use memory so the more you have, the faster it runs. I noticed a huge difference when I moved from 256Kb to 1Gb.

 

Well I had to quit the defragmenting. I'll restart it today. But when I did the disk clean up that took only like 20 seconds.

 

defragmentong

Another reason for keeping the C: drive as small as possiblem. Does not need defragmenting as often and when it it done it gets done quicker.

My C: is only 8.3gig with 5.8gig used and to takes at least 30 minutes to defrag.

BillyBob

 

Under windows Me, I first always did error checking, before defragmentation. If I did not, defragmentation, would not even finish.

So from the same tab (tools) select error checking, and then when its finished, do the defragmentation.

 

You can't do error-checking on Windows XP if your using NTFS. NTFS doesn't need the error-checking done.

 

Chkdsk does error checking on all NT versions and actually has more things to check with NTFS than with FAT32.

That being said, you cannot have chkdsk fix errors while the OS is running but if you set to do a check with fixes, it will run at next reboot.

 

what does defragmenting do?

 

http://searchwin2000.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid1_gci784231,00.html

There's a good explanation there and you may find the site useful for other queries when the need arises.

 

I use an "aftermarket" defrag program instead of the XP program. It's called DisKeeper. It has a few extra features that help keep your drive in a state of next to 0 fragmentation as you use your computer; behind the scene. The best one I use is Set and Forget. It also has the capabilitiy of defraging your Pagefile (Swap File on the older Windows OSes) which is nice if you set your own pagefiling size instead of letting Windows manage it. I thought it was worth mentioning here...