Get Organized This Year

Forget all of your other resolutions like quitting smoking and exercising more often. Nothing is more important to your well-being this year except getting your PC organized. You can increase your productivity and reduce downtime with a couple hours of general computer housekeeping that will get you through until next January. Some of these tips may seem a bit extreme, but your computer, your family and your dog will thank you.
Reformat Your Computer

I know it seems drastic, but this is a great time to start fresh with a new installation of Windows. Your PC will run like the day it was born. It’ll boot faster, shutdown faster and perform most tasks without having to work through months of fragmented data. Be sure to backup any important data, such as photos, music, movies and your Favorites folder before you begin. In fact, if you decide to reformat your computer, you don’t even have to read the rest of this article.

Delete All Email

You don’t have to delete your contacts, but you know your Email is bulging with SPAM and other correspondences that make your PC groan when you launch your Email client. This is less critical if you have an Internet-based Email program like Gmail or Yahoo Mail, but if you use Outlook or Outlook Express, your PC is downloading these files directly to your hard drive.

Organize Your Desktop

Just look at those icons scattered about. You should be ashamed of yourself. If it takes you ten minutes to find the big blue E on your desktop, then you’re a perfect candidate for a desktop cleaning. Most icons are merely shortcuts and deleting them is perfectly safe. If you’re unsure of what you can remove, right-click the desktop and create a new folder. Rename it whatever you want and then highlight those icons you want to get rid of and move them into the new folder. Just like that, your desktop is clean. If you find you don’t open that folder for a week, go ahead and delete it completely.

Clean Out Your Favorites Folder

Bookmarking websites is easy to do and a lot of us have links to websites in our Favorites folder we will never use again. Take five minutes to go through them and get rid of those old links. You can do this from your Favorites folder located in on the C: drive under your username or through your web browser.

Defrag Your Drives

Lastly, defragging a couple times a year is a simple way to speed up your PC. The less your hard drive needs to move to access data, the faster and cooler it will run. Be sure you run the Disk Cleanup utility first, as this will free-up a lot of space. Access these tools by going to Start, All Programs, Accessories, and then System Tools.