HOW TO…

14 pages of easy-to-follow workshops and expert tips

What you need: Windows PC Time required: Two hours

One of the hardest-working components in your computer is its primary drive (known as C:). This is where Windows lives, it’s the drive from which it boots, and it’s home to most of your programs and data. Keeping everything on C: is convenient, but it’s not always a good idea.

First, it fills the drive more quickly than you might expect, which can result in your computer becoming sluggish. Second, using a single drive for everything could shorten its working life and, if it corrupts, you would lose important documents and irreplaceable photos.

Here, we’ll guide you throug a spring clean of your C: drive, identifying data you can safely delete, and moving bulky or precious files to secondary or external drives. Before doing anything, make a complete backup of your data.

1 Identify files you can safely remove

Start with your Downloads folder. Copy important documents and PDFs to external storage, and delete anything you no longer need – especially bulky installation files that you could download