A little computer help

[canman]

Can anyone recommend any program that is good at cleaning up your hard drive. I've really noticed my computer slowing down, and I think its due to all the crap on my hard drive. But not being an evil computer genius, I'm a little gun shy just to start and remove things willy nilly. Also I would like to move all my music and pitures to another partition on my hard drive, is there anyway I can change my music and my pictures from the default C drive to D drive. Thanks for the help.

[oyajikun]

[GuyJean]

Can anyone recommend any program that is good at cleaning up your hard drive.

Buy an external HD with the money you'd spend on 'clean up' software, back up your entire system, initialize the computer and start over.. I find I don't use the same software I did 2 years ago, so getting rid of dead-weight altogether helps in performance..

GJ

[IkemenTommy]

I use System Mechanic to clean up the registry, annoying start up programs, and defrag the hard drive. Also run an antispyware and adware program. I recommend the free beta one from Microsoft.

[Socratesabroad]

GJ has a good idea with the periodic spring cleaning.

One method I'd suggest: keep your most-used apps (like Office) on the C drive but install other apps on a separate partition. Less data on the main drive will mean a tad faster access to programs you're running and defragging will be much easier.

Also, keeping your valuable data on another partition should 1) speed up access to it (again, less data to search) and 2) keep it safe in case the main partition does something it shouldn't.