photo credit: shioshvili
Is your computer’s Desktop or My Documents folders overflowing with files? Do you save a bunch of stuff to your desktop? Shortcuts to documents? Shortcuts to websites? Shortcuts to everything? Programs you downloaded and installed? Photographs downloaded from your camera? Do you let it all sit there until it takes over your desktop? A lot of folks I know do. Including myself every now and then.
Well, here are 4 tips to help get it all cleaned up and organized forever. I say forever because I need to create a new habit. Instead of taking the easy way out and saving everything to my desktop or the My Documents folder, I need to create a new habit to clean up my files and organize them and stick to one method of folder and file organization. Plus it will help keep my C: drive lean and mean.
1. Buy An External Hard Drive or Two
Buy one of the many USB/FireWire hard drives or internal hard drives that go inside your computer with tons of disk space, 250GB, 500GB, 1TB, 2TB, etc. like Western Digital’s My Book at newegg.com, Buy.com or Amazon.com, etc. Ultimately it would be good to buy two of them. If you’re nervous about losing any files, photos, documents, etc. you’ll make sure things get backed up.
One way to do that is to have two big USB hard drives, one as your main storage and one just sitting there backing up your main storage. I’ll discuss backup programs in another post. But, depending on what you need to back up, you can certainly use the built-in Windows backup utility or even use explorer to copy what you need to backup.
2. Move It Buddy
After you have your new additional hard drive or storage device, do the following:
- Create a folder on your new drive called 2008 or whatever you want to call it that makes sense to you. The purpose is to make sure you don’t just dump everything in the root of the new drive. Stick with a rule that you’ll just have folders off of the root of the new drive.
- Move the files you’ve been saving from your Desktop, My Documents and any other folders that you’ve been saving files to, to your new hard drive. Move them to the same named folders – Desktop, My Documents, etc. on the new drive. After you’re done doing that, make a shortcut on your desktop pointing at your new drive and the folder you just made from the root of the new drive.
- If your new drive is E: and the folder is 2008, then place a shortcut pointing to E:\2008 by right-clicking on your desktop and selecting New and then Shortcut. Browse to and select your new hard drive, the E: drive. The new shortcut will be named automatically for you or you can change the name to whatever you want, like EDrive.
You’ll have one shortcut on your desktop that points to your E: drive and you can save everything to that2008 folder to start, allowing you to keep your desktop clean and uncluttered.
If you’ve just done those two steps alone, you’ve done a lot and you’re on your way to becoming more organized and making your main C: drive speedier and uncluttered.
3. Uninstall Unnecessary Programs
Overtime you might install various software packages that you never use or used very little. In Windows XP, you can go Control Panel and select Add or Remove Programs. There you will find all the programs that you’ve installed over time. There will be a line for each program that indicates Used (Rarely, Occasionally, Frequently) and Last used on (date) that will help you determine whether to leave a program installed or not. You’ll be tempted to say to your self, “Oh, I’ll use it tomorrow or next week.” However, tomorrow and next week come and you don’t use the program, so uninstall it – NOW!! You’ll buy up a bunch of disk space and clean up your registry by doing this as well. Which is a good thing. 🙂
4. A Lean, Mean C: Drive – Defrag Your Hard Drive
Why do we want to keep our C: drive lean and mean? Well, as you use your computer and save stuff to your desktop and the My Documents folder, and other folders, your main hard drive or C: drive starts filling up. It also starts getting fragmented, which means the stuff that makes up all the stuff you save on your computer is stored all over the place on your hard drive.
When you save files, they get stored on your hard drive in pieces. You want those pieces to stay together as close as they can, so when you go to retrieve a file it loads up quickly. One way to help keep everything de-fragmented or unfragmented is by running the defrag program in Windows XP. This program will run through your hard drive and try to piece all the files you work on together in places that are close to each other.
In Windows XP, the defrag program is accessible by right-clicking on the My Computer and selecting Manage. Select Disk Defragmenter and do an “Analyze” on your main hard drive (C: Drive) and then click on the Defragment button. This might take a while depending on the size of your hard drive, so take a break.
If you find it too unbearable to use the built-in defragger, try one of these freely downloadable defraggers that make for speedier defrags:
That’s it. Do all four of these tips for now and you’ll be on your way to keeping a more organized and cleaned up PC.
Thanks for all of these tips. People do usually take these steps for granted because they usually do a lot of things on their computers that they forget to run useful utilities and also do back-up and transfer of files. There are some who doesn’t do these because they’re not aware that they should or they’re not aware how to, and this blog post would definitely be something that they can read on to know more about these procedures.