5 Best Ways to Clean Your PC Trash in 2020

Here’s how to eliminate digital litter and keep your PC running swimmingly and speedily.

PCs collect the digital equivalent of clutter over time, that is, the files from unwanted sites and applications, left downloads, and many such stuff. These can slow down your PC, so conducting a regular cleanup can make your pc run hassle-free. Here’s an important link from where we got you the best five ways to clean up your PC trash in 2020.

1. Perform a hard drive cleanup

Windows has an in-built tool for ridding the hard drive of unnecessary and unwanted files, so it’s worth using it more often.

Select and right-click the drive you want to clean under ‘This PC’ and click on Properties. When the dialogue box opens, select the ‘Disk Clean-up’ button on the ‘General’ tab.

Windows will conduct a quick check on the drive and then display a list of file types to clean.

You can keep the default selection of file types as it is, but just selecting everything won’t cause any issues.

Select OK to delete the selected files, which will not move to the Recycle Bin. A final box will ask you if you’re sure about deleting it permanently.

2. Empty the Recycle bin

 Checking your Recycle Bin is an excellent way to get back your files that you’ve deleted in a hurry and by accident, but a bin that’s dotted with n-number of files is a waste of space and file memory. Although, modern hard drives are large enough for this not to be a grave problem for most.

Yet, emptying the Recycle Bin from time to time will make it simpler for you to find files you do want to undelete. Emptying the recycle bin is just a matter of right-clicking it’s a desktop icon and clicking on ‘Empty Recycle Bin’.

You can also reduce the size of the Recycle Bin so that it empties itself automatically more often when it gets full. Right-click and select the Desktop icon, click on Properties and edit the Custom size value.

 Until you empty the trash from the recycle bin and delete those files, they’re still saved in your system. The Disk Cleanup utility should perform this task for you, but regularly emptying the trash yourself is the best practice to avoid clumping up the works.

3. Check your hard drive for errors

Windows automatically checks your hard drive for errors whenever it restarts after a crash, but it’s worth doing this yourself once every few days.

In ‘This PC,’ right-click on a drive and click on Properties.

Select the ‘Tools’ tab, click on ‘Check’ under the ‘Error checking’ tab, then select ‘Start’ on the dialogue box that is displayed. This check would take a couple of minutes.

One possible cause of a PC slowdown is an error in the way your hard drive stores and accesses data. And the notable thing is, Windows has an in-built utility that helps scan and sometimes fix hard drive issues such as lost clusters, directory errors, or bad sectors. Right-click on your local disk, select ‘Properties, go to the ‘Tools’ tab, and you’ll see an option to ‘Check’ the disk for errors. The scan may take some time to complete. If there are fixable errors on your hard drive, this can be an easy way to do a minor performance enhancement on your computer.

4. Defrag your hard drive

 Disk fragmentation happens because of the way hard drives store data. Files are divided into smaller bits and stored wherever there’s an empty space.

As new files are created and old ones get deleted, free space becomes dispersed over the drive, and the chunks of data that make up files become dispersed as well.

This ‘fragmentation’ makes files slower to read and write, which in turn slows down your computer, but Windows has an in-built defragmentation tool to rectify it.

Your PC should be defragmenting automatically periodically, but you can do it whenever you want. Search ‘Defragment’ using Cortana search and click on Defragment and optimize drives. Choose one of the drives listed, then click Optimise to start the procedure. This can consume some time, so it’s best left running for a longer time or overnight. Or, if you leave your pc switched on when you’re not using it, you can set a schedule for defragmentation to run automatically.

5. Flush your browser

All browsers create temporary files as you browse the web. While the in-built cleanup tool will discard some, however, won’t remove them all.

 Most important is clear browser cache, history and temporary internet files. These are a few more things that can slow down your web browsing. Unless you have a particular requirement to keep track of your browser history, do regularly brush and clear it out. You have to do the same for cached versions of websites and temporary Internet files, both of which take up real space on your hard drive. In Chrome, go to the main Chrome menu and select ‘Clear Browsing Data’ to see all of your options.

These were the best five ways in 2020 by which you can discard digital clutter and clean up your PC.