Hard Drive and Disk Cleanup
Defragmenting Your Computer
Lori Hawkins, Curriculum Integration Specialist
Jennifer Cronan, Education Technology Specialist

Is your computer acting sluggish these days? Have your desktop icons taken on a "generic" appearance? If so, this sluggishness may be due to a messy hard drive or corrupted desktop material. Just like you (and your house), a clean computer feels better and, therefore, performs better. Here is the easy way to get your computer cleaned up and improve its performance. Just follow these directions to perform two simple operations: disk cleanup and defragmenting files.

Disk Cleanup
Disk Cleanup will remove temporary files that are no longer needed by your computer. The disk cleanup process will take several minutes in order to calculate how much space the computer can make available. If you haven't done this in awhile, the amount of space that becomes free will be significant.

For PC

1. From your desktop, double-click My Computer.
2. In the My Computer window you have just opened, right-click on the icon for your hard drive. This is usually labeled as the C: drive.
3. From the main menu, choose Properties.
4. Select General.
5. Click Disk Cleanup at the bottom of the General tab.
6. Make sure all items are checked and click OK.
7. Click YES to confirm.
   

For MAC

1. While booting up your computer, hold down the Command (open apple symbol) and Option keys until you hear the machine "ding" twice.
2. A Rebuilding Desktop dialog box appears. Just follow the prompts and answer the questions. If you have other partitions on your hard drive, you will see a dialog box asking if you wish to rebuild each one of these

Defragmenting Files
Defragmenting your hard drive will move all the data around on the hard drive so there are large spaces for storing additional data rather than a number of small spaces. This process definitely takes a while (sometimes overnight) but by compacting the data on your hard drive, your computer has an easier time finding available storage space.

For PC

1. Quit all applications that are currently running.
2. From your desktop, double-click My Computer.
3. In the My Computer window you have just opened, right-click on the icon for your hard drive. This is usually labeled as the C: drive.
4. From the main menu, choose Properties.
5. Select Tools.
6. Click Defragment Now at the bottom of this window. If you have other partitions on your hard drive, follow the process above for these as well.

For MAC

1. Follow the procedure to Rebuild Desktop described for MAC Disk Cleanup above.
2. If you are unsuccessful, run Disk First Aid on your entire system. (This feature is a built-in program on all MACs that will generally run automatically if problems occur.)
3. If computer is still sluggish, consider purchasing a third party application, such as Norton Disk Doctor.