News & Updates

Spring Cleaning Your Hard Drive

By Ryan Coyle

March 11, 2015

It’s spring, at least, almost.  While it may be hard to believe that the Easter Bunny will be hopping down the lane anytime soon as most of us are still shoveling out from a brutal winter, it is true.  Spring begins this month!  For some of us, spring goes beyond bunnies and green grass and lends itself towards a time of renewal and cleaning.  If this is you, put down your Clorox for a moment and let’s look at cleaning something many of us don’t think about: your computer’s hard drive.  Cleaning out your hard drive can have many benefits, the least of which can be improving performance. 

Here are some tips to help you trim down the fat that might be hiding on your hard drive:

Clean out your downloads folder – Here’s a fun fact about your downloads folder.  Everything that you generally put in it, you downloaded off the Internet.  If you’re like most people, the file you need gets downloaded, used for whatever purpose, and left in the downloads folder.  Your downloads folder becomes a wasteland of files that you’ve had your way with and left to rot.  To clean this out, navigate to the folder, press Control+A (or Cmd+A, if you’re an Apple user) and delete.  Breathe deep friend.  Those files aren’t gone forever (yet).  The other good news would be if you downloaded it once, you can download it again.  If you had immediate second thoughts or regrets grab a Xanax before we go any further.

Clean out your local mail – In 2010 we transitioned from hosting our own mail system over to the Google Mail system that we have now.  If you were around in those dark times before Gmail you often had to fight with a tiny 500MB disk quota.  This lead a lot of us to move mail off the server and on to our local hard drives.  I have good news though.  In 2015, in Gmail, we have an unlimited quota for mail.  It’s not even like the “unlimited” plan at the Chinese buffet.  We’ll let you store all the mail you ever wanted and not give you any dirty looks after your twelfth trip through the line.  Moving your mail up off your local hard drive has numerous benefits, including cleaning out that used disk space, allowing Google to index your mail for faster searching and purging yourself of some digital baggage. The help desk can help you transition your mail from local Thunderbird or other mail program stores to Gmail.  Let’s be honest, how often have you had to reach out and dig out a message from 2007?  Once in a blue moon?  While I know of a few holdouts who have been hanging on to their local mail because even the mighty Google mail quota was insufficient to hold their mail storage needs.  Now that we have transitioned to unlimited storage now even you can clean out that giant chunk of storage from your computer.

Archive those photos and videos – One of the fathers of the Internet, (no not Al Gore) Vint Cerf recently spoke in San Jose about how we could approach a digital dark age as our entire generation is moved from physical artifacts to digital ones.  As we continue to move towards the digitization of everything, if the means to show those bits should disappear, what would people know of us moving forward?  It’s a bit deep for this article and if you’re interested in the topic I suggest researching it more.  The moral here is that while we tend to accumulate thousands of pictures and videos.  We download them to our computers and forget about them.  Instead of having them languish on our hard drives, print out your best ones and burn the rest to DVD.  While I won’t discount the need to have a digital copy of them, there is a certain value to having a physical copy of some pictures (no, not your bathroom selfies).  If they’re important to you, burning them to a DVD and getting them off your main computer will protect them should something happen to your computer.  It would also clear out a lot of disk space for you.  Videos are a slightly different beast as those are tough to transition to physical media.  If you’re interested in archiving videos, burning them to DVD would probably be the best option.

Remove unused applications – If you’ve had your computer for a long enough time, you’ll find you probably have a handful of applications that you installed on your machine that seemed like a good idea at the time, or were useful, but aren’t so much anymore.  You can clear out that disk space by removing them.  On Windows, if you go to your Control Panel, then Programs & Features, you’ll see a list of programs that are installed on your machine.  On a Mac, you can navigate to your Applications folder to see a list of programs that are installed there.  If you’re not sure about something, you may want to contact the help desk before axing anything.  Alternatively, if you’re aggressive, you can contact the help desk to reinstall applications that you axed that maybe you shouldn’t have.

Re-evaluate your music collection – If you’re like me, you spent a lot of the last 10-20 years or so with these strange items called CDs.  Small metallic looking devices that used to hold about 10-12 songs.  If you’re also like me, you’ve probably converted a lot of those CDs into digital mp3 versions.   You’ve built up an impressive collection of music ranging from your prized Nickelback B-sides to that indie band that played at your college when you were an undergrad.  The times though, they are a changing.  As the music industry has changed their delivery model from CDs to singles and from physical devices to digital streaming, more options are available for getting your music fix.  While I own a modest collection, by some standards, of mp3s I find that more and more, I never listen to them.  I have instead moved to streaming audio services like Pandora, or Spotify to play music.  This has allowed me to listen to all the same songs that I did in the past, without carrying the digital baggage of loads of music on my computer.  If this is you, it might be a good time to move those files off your machine and on to a more permanent storage.

Enlist some help – Last but not least, once you’ve done the above, you’ll probably need some help to remove the remaining detritus from your machine.  This generally takes the form of temp files that are written to your computer, either from downloaded updates, temporary documents, cookies and the like.  Finding the places where all these files hide can be troublesome.  Luckily, there is an app called CCleaner which is designed to help you clean out all those unwanted files and remove them from your computer.  CCleaner is available from a company called Piriform and you can download it for free right from their website: http://www.piriform.com.  Once installed, the application will perform a scan and tell you which files it found and what it can delete.  You’ll want to double check the list to make sure there isn’t anything in there that you want to save (if so, uncheck those boxes) and hit Run Cleaner.  This program does a great job of cleaning out the junk that accumulates on our machines over time.  It is also cross platform and works on both Macs and PCs.  CCleaner is a great program, but one that you generally don’t need to keep on your machine.  Once it’s done it’s trick, you’re welcome to remove it.

Empty the Recycle Bin – At long last, after everything else, the time has come to empty the recycling bin.  This will remove all the old files from your machine once and for all.  Before you hit that button, you’ll be happy to know that even if you deleted something you didn’t want to or did so accidentally, the good news is, if you’re using CrashPlan, you can still probably recover it (you are using CrashPlan, aren’t you?)

Hopefully if you follow these tips you can trim down your hard drive size, much easier than your waist size.  For that, see Dave Thompson and his wonderful folks who are promoting wellness on campus!