Performing routine maintenance on your computer is always a good idea and recommend that you do so a couple of times a year. Managing your files for organizational purposes is important but getting rid of files just so your PC will perform better is not a good idea. There is a major misconception amongst users that deleting files from your computer will somehow improve the performance.

A computer that has 100 data files will run no faster than a computer that has 10,000 data files. The only impact that a large volume of files will have is it will fill up your hard drive! If your hard drive is getting close to full, then getting the urge to purge would make sense. You can check to see how full your hard drive is by doing the following steps:

Open My Computer -->  Right click on Drive C:  -->  Select Properties

A pie chart will display on your screen displaying a blue section representing your data the the purple section your free space left on your hard drive. If the purple section is a very small portion of the pie, then it is time to start removing data files.

The quickest way to free up disk space is to uninstall unnecessary programs. Documents and spreadsheets take up a lot less space than pictures, music and especially video files. You can remove programs usually within the application by looking for an Uninstall Option or you can open Control Panel and select the Add/Remove Programs option.

Removing programs or files just because you don't know what they are is very dangerous! You will probably suffer from self-inflicted deletion wounds if you try. There is a better way to improve performance already built into the Windows operating system and should be ran a couple of times a month. You will find this option with these steps:

Click Start  -->  Select Programs  -->  Select Accessories  -->  Select System Tools  -->  Select Disk Cleanup Utility

Be very careful of companies that try to sell you programs that will clean up your Windows registry for as little as $29.95 that will perform miracles on your computer. If you want it done right, do it yourself!