Spring has sprung! Goodbye cold, miserable winter days. Hello warm(er), spring weather! It’s that time of the year where you start dusting away those winter blues and take charge of organizing your household. Why not use the same idea to your computer too? Spring cleaning your computer makes the system run faster and lets you to work more efficiently.

There are few very simple tips you can take and utilities you can use to clean up the ‘debris’ that may be cluttering up your system:

Eliminate clutter
Have you been noticing that your computer system has the tendency to freeze numerous times or is getting progressively slower? It’s probably because you have a lot of programs and files on your desktop!

It is recommended that you start cleaning up your icons. Take a look at your system tray or taskbar on the bottom right corner. Those small icons represent programs that start up as your computer boots.

Remove or turn off unnecessary ones with a swift right click.

What about those files, pictures and MP3s on your desktop? Do you really need the shortcut access? Probably not!

Tip: Categorize them in the Documents, Photos and Music folders to keep them organized and eliminate the clutter on your desktop.

Remove old and unused programs
You might want to consider removing or deleting those programs that you haven’t used for more than 6 months! These programs will use up your hard drive space and will make your system slower.
Unfortunately, you can’t simply delete a program by trashing it in the Recycle Bin. You have to use the Uninstall command (under Programs and Features in the Control Panel) or the uninstall key that comes with your program.

Scan for viruses and malwares.
You should be scanning your computer for viruses and malwares regularly! Why? There are new forms of malwares invading your system on a daily basis. Scanning may take a really long time so it is best to perform a quick scan daily to check for ‘infection’ for all the important area.
For full scans, you must plan ahead of time as this might take a few hours or even overnight! Plan accordingly. It is recommended that you should perform a full scan at least once a week or if you’re always on the go and don’t have time to do so, try to run a full scan at least once a month.
It is also very important to ensure that your antivirus program is up-to-date! If you still haven’t updated your Ad-Aware yet, you can do so by clicking here.