When your Windows The computer becomes cluttered – filled with files, folders and applications you don’t need – your productivity can take a hit. It also makes the experience of using your PC much less pleasant and much more frustrating.

It doesn’t have to be this way. There are a few tricks you can use to tidy up your Windows computer and get it back to near-new condition, and none of them take much time to implement. Let us guide you through a quick Windows decluttering session.

Tidy up the office

If you often drop various files and folders on your desktop for easy access, you’re not alone: ​​many of us do this, rather than categorizing things in an orderly manner. The problem is that as more and more files pile up, it becomes harder to find what you are looking for and it also ruins the look of your desktop.

Windows has a few features that can help you. Right-click on an empty area of ​​the desktop, then choose See in the menu that appears: from there you can activate Align icons to grid (which snaps the icons into a grid layout) and Automatically arrange icons (which places your icons in a grid and aligns them to the top and left of the screen). To further tidy up the screen, you can change the size of the icons from the same submenu.

There is another help feature here: if you right-click on an empty area of ​​the desktop, choose sort byYou can organize your files and folders by name, size, item type or modification date. Choose the latter option with auto layout, and your most recent files will be easily accessible in the top left corner.

Another thing that can be helpful is to create a “Temp” folder on the desktop and use it effectively instead of your desktop. It’s only one extra click away, but it means your desktop stays clear (and you can see your beautiful wallpaper). If you make sure you only put files here that you don’t need in the long term, you can also erase them periodically.

Streamlining the interface

You navigate Windows through the Start menu and the taskbar, and you can clean both areas. In the case of the Start menu, you can right-click any shortcut icon to pin it to the top of the menu (or unpin it again), pin it to the taskbar (or the unpin it again) and move it to the Start menu. in front of pinned applications in the Start menu. You can also simply drag pinned items to the Start menu to reorder them.

More options are available if you open Windows Settings from the Start menu and then choose Personalization And To start. You can change the menu layout, choose what is displayed or not (including most used apps and recently opened files), and place key folders directly in the Start menu if necessary.

Skip to Taskbar below Personalizationand you have a few more options. Here you can show or hide the search box, widget area and task view icon (to switch between desktops). Below Taskbar behaviorsYou can change the alignment of the taskbar, make the taskbar automatically hide when not in use, decide whether notification badges appear, and much more.

You can also interact with the actual taskbar icons. Right click on any icon and you can choose Pin to taskbar so it stays there permanently (right-click and choose Remove from taskbar to remove icons you don’t want to see all the time). You can also click and drag icons on the taskbar to rearrange them.

Clean files and folders

You might be surprised how quickly junk files can accumulate on your Windows system: forgotten downloads, temporary installation files, outdated cached data, and more. Microsoft knows this is a problem, however, and has built-in tools to help you keep everything in order.

Open the Start menu, search for “disk cleanup,” then select the first result that appears. You’ll be asked to choose which hard drive you want to scan, and then the utility will get to work: it will list all the different types of temporary files that you can safely clean, from what’s currently in the Recycle Bin to ‘to Windows. error reports.

At the top of the screen, you’ll see the total amount of disk space you can save by erasing everything, but you can select each file type individually, with a running total displayed below. If you also want to include Windows system files, choose Clean system files. Click ALL RIGHT to confirm your choices and start the cleaning process.

You can access more options in Settings by choosing System SO Storage. Here you can enable Storage Sense, which automatically cleans up temporary files as you go, and get more recommendations on which files you might want to get rid of. Click Cleaning Recommendations SO Large or unused filesfor example, to view files taking up a lot of space that you might be able to do without.

Delete apps you don’t need

Deleting programs that you don’t use very often works great for decluttering your Windows PC and freeing up storage space. Keep in mind that you can always reinstall these apps if you need to, but if they’re gathering digital dust, it’s best to get rid of them for now.

To do this, open Settings and choose Applications > Installed applications. By default, you will see all your installed apps listed in alphabetical order, but if you click sort by In the box, you can place the oldest or largest apps at the top of the list, which might give you a better idea of ​​what software you can live without.

When you find a program you can uninstall, click the three dots next to it, then choose Uninstall. The exact process here varies from application to application, but with a few steps you should be able to remove the software and its associated files from your system, leaving you with a simpler PC setup.

It’s also a good idea to limit the number of programs that can start at the same time as Windows: even if you keep applications, you don’t necessarily want them running all the time. To make changes, open Settings and choose Applications > Getting startedand you can view the current list and remove items from it if necessary.

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