Computersight -

One factor that drastically increases the potential for your hard drive to crash is the amount of stuff you have on your computer. The more stuff you add to your computer, the slower its speed will become. Pretty soon, you notice your computer will start freezing up more and more frequently. Then, the unexpected happens one day when the computer just shuts down completely, refusing to restart.

Having endured this identical scenario twice, I know firsthand how frustrating it is to suddenly be without your computer. On top of that, though it is possible to recover some files after a hard drive crash, data does get completely wiped out.

Though there are many ways to promote the health of your computer, for now, I will focus on one in particular. Did you know that everytime you surf the internet, the internet stores temporary files on your computer? Depending on how much time you spend on the computer, these temporary internet files can take up a lot of room. Also, the more room they take up, the slower your computer will operate.

Luckily, there is a way to deal with this. I am not the best computer expert by any means, but I do know enough to know this. In Windows (I am not 100% sure about other operating systems; will find out soon), the temporary internet files are located in your hard drive. To access them, do the following:

1. Click the ‘START’ tab (which is generally located at the bottom left corner of your screen) to open the START MENU

2. Click on ‘CONTROL PANEL’

3. Click the ‘INTERNET OPTIONS’ icon

4. Under the tab labeled ‘GENERAL’ (at the top, directly under the task bar), you will see in the middle of this window   the section titled ‘TEMPORARY INTERNET FILES’. There are three buttons. The first is labeled ‘DELETE   COOKIES’, the second is labeled ‘DELETE FILES’, and the third is labeled ‘SETTINGS’. If you want to just go   ahead and delete the files now, click ‘DELETE FILES’. However, if you are interested in finding out the   location of this special folder that holds your temporary internet files, click ‘SETTINGS’.

5. You should see the current location of this file half-way down the page. To access these files, click ‘VIEW FILES’

6. You will then be redirected to another window, which is the ‘TEMPORARY INTERNET FILES’ folder. If you choose, you can   now highlight all the files within this folder, right-click the files, then delete them. Or, you can manually go through and delete specific files that you don’t want.

See? It’s simple, and not to mention cost-effective. Without having to pay anyone, you have just cleared up a little space on your hardrive.