Your computer is one of the most hardworking things in the home. Even more when you work from home, or you spend a lot of time on it. When you first start saving files and downloading things, you might not notice a decrease in speed. But, over time, it will become more apparent. There is a range of things that you can do speeding up your computer and free up some space too.
Files
Have a look through your downloads, on your desktop, and through other file areas on your computer. What do you still use? What should you still keep? Much of the answer will rely on the date you added or last opened the file.
If you have files that don’t have dates and details in the name, then you are going to have to view files from ‘Date Added’ or ‘Last Modified’ to give you the answers. Anything that you use regularly should be in the keep pile. Make sure that you label the file or folder correctly. Anything that you still need but don’t open periodically can be moved to a HDD.
Apps
If you started to download a lot of applications to try out, then left them to gather dust, now is the perfect time to get rid of them. If you need tips on how to delete apps from a Mac, then check the link for a guide.
In general, even when you think you have entirely removed everything, there are going to be some leftover trash files speeding up your computer. CleanMyMac or the Free Up Space tool (Windows) will help you take care of those pesky leftovers.
Start-Up
Even if you haven’t meant to, there might be a lot of applications starting up when your computer is in the middle of juddering into life. The chances are you aren’t going to need everything that is running on your startup. There are a couple of options, but let’s look at a way to tackle this on a Windows system first.
Navigate to your Task Manager (you can typically use CTRL+SHIFT+ESC to bring it up nice and quickly. Head to the ‘Startup’ tab, and you can see everything that is launching at startup. Disable what you don’t need. For a Mac, if you want to get it done quickly, then CleanMyMac has the ability to do that for you.
If you have more than a few tabs open at a time, not only will that slow you down, but it will give you computer extra work that you probably don’t need it to be doing. The same thing applies if you have 3 or 4 heavy memory items open at once.
Becoming more efficient with how you work and speeding up your computer will mean there is less work for your computer to have to tackle too. Do a weekly admin run on your computer, and you will delete things you don’t need more quickly, your file names will make sense, and your computer will be running more efficiently too.