2,131 Tutorials

How to clean up your PC for maximum performance

Organise your desktop and remove junk files

It’s time to make resolutions to detox and declutter. We show you how to apply the same resolve to your PC life, speeding up your machine in the process.

Step 3. You should be able to identify a file’s content from its name, without needing to open it. Adding the location to holiday photo filenames is a good example. It can also be useful to include the date. If you’ve got lots of similar files to rename, copy and paste the common information into each file being renamed.

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Step 4. Get a better view of what’s in your folders: click the ‘Change your view’ icon at the top-right corner of a folder and select Details. File size, creation date and other information will now appear next to a list of your documents. Reorder the list by date, file size and so on by clicking the various tabs at the top of the window.

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Step 5. Keywords, which are visible when you right-click a file and choose Properties, make a file easier to search for. In Word, go to File, Properties, fill in the Keywords field and press Ok. For photos, tags are the equivalent of keywords; click the Tags field at the bottom of a Windows Explorer pane to add them.

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Step 6. If you need to find a file in a hurry, enter its name into the Start menu Search box. The Windows Search Assistant is useful in such cases, but it’s no match for a desktop-search engine like Copernic. This free program indexes your entire hard drive to make finding the file you’re looking for much faster.

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NEXT PAGE: Clean out junk files to restore PC performance

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