Life Skills - Day 27

How to Clean Up a Computer

My brother-in-law is pretty much a computer genius so he taught me some basics on how to clean up my computer of all of the junk that is on it to help give me more hard drive space and help it run faster. I didn't get any pictures of it, but it's actually much simpler than I thought it would be, so I think you can all figure this out without illustrations. We started by downloading "CCleaner" from piriform.com, and running the "Cleaner" program. After that, we went to the "Register" tab and cleaned that up as well. While this was all going on, I was very thankful that he knew what he was doing, because I know far less about computers than I probably should, and was a little nervous about making any sort of changes. When the CCleaner was done, I used the "Spybot search and destroy" program (also easily found and downloaded online from CNet.com) to "Immunize" my program and computer and then "Search and Destroy" to remove any bad stuff that it found. It was all fairly simple, and I freed up about 2.5 GB of hard disk space, so it was definitely worthwhile. There wasn't anything too terribly bad on my computer, just quite a bit of junk to clean up. He says that I should be doing this about every two months, to clean up all the cookies and temporary files and unused programs, so I'll try to remember in the future. But for now, I am very glad that he is just a phone call away when I have computer problems, because evidently I know nothing about computers (my own realization, no one had to tell me that) ;)