There are several steps you can take to help make a computer more reliable, and reliability can translate into better performance. Keeping your computer running reliably involves keeping your disk clean of unwanted files and keeping your disk defragmented. Clean Things up with Disk Cleanup Disk Cleanup examines a computer’s drive to determine what files can be deleted. Disk Cleanup can find and delete the following types of files:

• Downloaded program files

• Temporary Internet files

• Offline Web pages

• Recycle Bin contents

• Setup log files

• Temporary files

• Thumbnails

• Archived Windows Error Reporting

To run Disk Cleanup:

1. Click Start, point to All Programs, point to Accessories, point to System Tools, and then click Disk Cleanup. You can also type Disk Cleanup in the Search box on the Start menu.

2. Choose whether to clean up only the current user’s files or files from all users on the computer.

3. Select the drive you want to clean up and then click OK.

4. After scanning the disk, Disk Cleanup presents the types of files that it found and shows how much disk space deleting those files will free up, as shown in Figure 1. Select the checkboxes of the file types you want to delete and then click OK.


Figure 1. Use Disk Cleanup to delete unused files

Disk Cleanup becomes even more effective if you schedule it to happen automatically. To schedule Disk Cleanup to run automatically:

1. Click Start. In the Search box, type Task Scheduler.

2. Click Task Scheduler.

3. In the Actions pane, select Create Basic Task.

4. Type a name for the task, and then click Next.

5. Select how often the task should run. For Disk Cleanup, Weekly is a good choice. Click Next.

6. Set the time and day the task should run, and then click Next.

7. Select Start A Program in the Action list. Click Next.

8. Click Browse, navigate to the System32 folder (the default), and then select cleanmgr. Click Open.

9. Click Next, and then click Finish.