3 Ways to Clean Your Windows PC

Keeping your files nice and organized not only makes working with your PC easier, but can also have improved speed implications. For example, if an SSD is more than 70% full, it will start to decrease its write speeds. In today’s newsletter I will share 3 viable ways on how to declutter your Windows PC.

1. Remove Old Apps

Old and unused apps can take up unnecessary space in your computer and even pose security risks if not updated. What is interesting is that some app sizes aren’t correctly shown due to a large number temporary files stored by that particular app.

Here’s how to quickly identify and remove old apps.

Open Settings > Apps > Apps & features to see the list of currently-installed applications on your PC. You can sort by name, size, or install date. I recommend sorting by size. Since your digital spring cleaning is focused on efficiency, look at the largest programs you have installed.

After you sort everything by size, you will see the apps that take up the most space. Notice how in my PC, Mail and Calendar takes up the most space. This is a prime example of an app that caches a large amount of information and takes up an unnecessarily high amount of space.

Once you decide which apps you want to remove, go ahead and click on the app and tap Uninstall.

2. Clean Up Your Browser

Your web browser, be it Chrome, Firefox or for come odd reason Edge, stores cookies to enhance your browsing experience with personalization or quicker load times (cached pages).

Say you visit Facebook, your browser quickly loads some of the unchanged content from your browser, while it’s receiving the data for the rest of the page that has changed since your last visit.

This cache takes up space and if you’d like to clean it up here’s what you should do.

In Chrome, click the three buttons in the top-right corner and click Settings. Click Clear browsing data and choose Cookies and other data and Cached images and files. Once you have chosen these two, click Clear data.

Just remember that this will make your web site load speed a little slower, initially.

3. Delete Not Needed Files

Your computer accumulates unnecessary temporary files over time. These files are used to enhance your app experience, similar to the Browser caching. There might be apps that you have not used for a long time that have this dead weight of megabytes sitting on your hard drive. You can erase these files as well.

The good news is that Windows 10 has an integrated, built-in tool that helps you clear out these files and free up storage space. Open Settings > System > Storage > Temporary files. This displays a list of all temporary files on your PC. You can choose between individual sections or select all of the files and delete them.

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