How to clean your hard drive

Cleaning your PC's hard drive is a good way of freeing up wanted space, thereby enabling your computer to run quicker. Wiping the files on a computer is also undertaken when a computer is sold or scraped. This article looks at how to clean up disk space on your computer.

Giving your PC a spring clean

According to Microsoft, people use fewer than 10% of the programs that are installed on their computers. Over the years, people acquire a large number of files, games and programs that they don't use. This leads computer owners to go through the motions of completely data wiping files. How to clean your PC When you want to clean your PC, you need to decide which files you want to wipe. The types of files that you don't need are the following: 1. .tmp files - These files are only temporary files. You may locate these files in your c:\temp folder. By clicking on F3 on your desktop, a 'Find' dialog box will pop up. In the search bar, type in *.tmp and you will be presented with all the .tmp files on your computer that you can delete. 2. Cache files - In the 'options' section in Internet Explorer, click on 'Advanced' followed by selecting 'Cache'. Click on 'Clear Memory Cache' and 'Clear Disk Cache' to wipe the disk space. 3. Filecheck files - Whenever your computer doesn't close down correctly, the files that get lost are saved as file000.chk files, numbered 0001, 0002 etc. When you locate these files in your C: directory, you can delete them. You can also find them by pressing F3 again on your desktop and by typing in *.chk in the search box. All of these files that show up can be deleted. 4. Data files - These files can easily pile up in your computer. If you haven't opened a word file or a PowerPoint file in a while, then it might be a good idea to do a disk erase to free up some space.

Data erasing tools

To completely rid your computer of unwanted files, a Hard Drive Eraser, or HDD eraser is a worthy investment to make. The HDD is a free Windows application that will completely wipe the data on your hard drive. It does this by filling the magnetic surface numerous times with binary data that is useless. The DOD Wipe, or the Department of Defense is a bleaching and shredding process that writes over a file with a set of random numbers and characters about three times so that the information on the file can't be recovered.