When your computer is running slowly, you may stop to wonder what’s causing it. The causes can be legion, and not all of them have to do with the contents of your hard drive.
That’s an excellent place to start, but one must remember that body and mind are tied in people, and that’s just as true in computers.
National Clean Out Your Computer Day reminds you that you need to take care of the whole system, inside and out, digital and physical, so get to it!
What to do on this day is right there in the name– clean out your computer! When was the last time you cleaned out your fans and dusted off your motherboard?
Have you looked at your graphics card to see if its cooling fan and fins are clean? For that matter, when did you last clean out you even opened the case?
Make sure that your system is powered down and disconnected (don’t panic! You’ll survive the half-hour or so you have it down, I promise!) and then find a good online tutorial to show you the way to get it done safely.
All that dust traps heat, and if you aren’t aware, computers really don’t function well under high stress and heat.
Start by tearing down that case, opening it up, and clean out all of the dust and grime that’s inside. You may have more dust than you think in there, and it’s causing your system to slow down.
Get the Hard Drive cleaned out next. Perform some recommended system maintenance checks and tidy up those old files, apps, documents and other items that are no longer necessary.
A clogged up hard drive can be just as bad as a clogged up fan on your computer, though it won’t as often destroy your computer. Also, perform a cookie cleanup on your web browser to make it run more efficiently.
Now you can enjoy another year of a smooth running computer, almost as fast as the day you bought them!
National Clean Out Your Computer Day was started in 2000 as an initiative of the Institute for Business Technology.
The event was started to act as a reminder for people all over the world to get the most out of their computers — and stay safe while using them.
Modern operating systems rely on free disk space for “virtual memory” (paging/swap files) and for temporary working files; when a drive is close to full, the system has fewer contiguous blocks to work with and must work harder to read and write data.
Microsoft’s performance guidance explains that low free space can cause noticeable slowdowns because Windows constantly uses disk as an extension of RAM, especially during multitasking or large updates.
