How To Clean System Junk For Free

It'due south finally May. The wintertime frost is thawing across the U.S., and thoughts are turning to baseball game, the Memorial Day weekend, and cleaning out your PC. Okay, maybe that final one isn't for everybody.

But along with wiping down those windows, clearing out your eaves, and fertilizing the backyard, spring is as good a time every bit any to make sure your PC is prissy and tidy.

Unlike that fence that needs patching, giving your PC a spring overhaul doesn't require much endeavour on your function. In fact, the right set of tools tin practise most of the piece of work for yous.

CCleaner Free

The legendary CCleaner clears out all the gunk accumulating on your difficult drive including temporary Net files, arrangement memory dumps, log files, and then on.

Once CCleaner'due south installed, just tap Analyze and let CCLeaner exercise its matter. When it's done analyzing (and you're okay with everything it's going to erase), click the Run Cleaner button and and then OK.

You lot'll exist amazed at how much junk CCleaner tin get rid of. After I ran it on my PC it removed nigh 1.6GB of unnecessary files.

PC Decrapifier

If y'all've bought a new computer in the past few months or have never bothered to become rid of the all the crapware installed on your PC at the manufacturing plant, try PC Decrapifier.

This desktop plan will analyze your PC for unnecessary programs and offer to erase them in majority. Y'all can also use information technology every bit a mode to clear off any programs you lot no longer want on your PC with merely a few clicks.

DropIt

If you want to get really serious about your spring cleaning, you can use DropIt to automate how specific files are organized on your PC. Let's say you want all PNG files on your desktop that are less than ane megabyte to be moved to a sub-folder in your Pictures library called Pocket-sized Photos.

You can set up a rule for that to happen then have DropIt monitor your desktop in the background to move files automatically.

The downside is you have to create your own rules before DropIt volition practise anything, simply DropIt comes with a good getting started guide to help. But right-click the DropIt icon on your desktop and select Guide.

Managing your deejay space

Spring cleaning is some other slap-up opportunity to use a new built-in disk management characteristic in Windows 8.1. The refreshed PC Settings app shows exactly how much space your Documents, Downloads, Music, Pictures, and Video folders are taking upwardly, giving you a clear view of where all your gigabytes are going.

This is a great tool for deciding if information technology's time to offload your photograph or video collections to an external difficult drive. For more than data, check out "Manage your hard drive space with Windows 8.i'due south hidden, helpful tools."

Finally, accept the time to run a full scan of your PC with a security tool similar Malware Bytes Anti-Malware Complimentary to clean whatsoever lingering bad actors off your arrangement. Even if you're already running an anti-virus program, an anti-malware app like Malware Bytes is a good thing to run every now and then to guard against newer exploits, Trojans, and other malicious software.