Personal computers have become a critical component of college students' lives. Here at Amherst, having access to a computer is absolutely necessary in order to manage classes, events, activities and friends. For many students, it would be difficult to imagine how to live without a computer. Their essays, coursework, music, videos and other important information are stored on this complex device that needs to be maintained and protected from damage. Yet, a significant number of people do not know how to keep their computers running well and the data on them secure. A computer, just like any other machine, needs to be taken care of regularly. In this article, I focus on cleaning and defragmenting the hard disk.

Although most people would not keep year-old food items in their refrigerators, many of them do keep unnecessary files on their computers. (If you do happen to keep year-old food in your refrigerator, please stop reading this article and call the doctor because those alfalfa sprouts in the delicious sandwich you just ate, well, weren't alfalfa.) Computers will not cause stomach troubles, but they will slow down if there are too many old and unnecessary files sitting around. Some uninstalled programs may leave remnant files on your hard drive.

A free program that is quite useful for cleaning up the garbage on Windows is CCleaner. Do a search for it on the Internet or go directly to www.CCleaner.com to download it. Another way to free up some space on Windows is to go to Start> All Programs> Accessories> System Tools> Disk Cleanup. Check the boxes for: Downloaded Program Files, Temporary Internet Files, Offline Webpages, Office Setup Files, Recycle Bin, Temporary Files and WebClient/ Publisher Temporary Files. Then, click OK.

Good PC performance requires running the disk defragmenting utility weekly or fortnightly. Fragmentation occurs when the files stored on the hard disk become broken up into pieces and spread across different regions of the disk. This is a natural process that increases in frequency with the amount of times a user accesses and saves files to the hard disk. It takes a lot longer for a computer to return a fragmented file than a continuous one. A defragmentation utility reassembles most of the file fragments and consolidates any empty space.

Keeping the hard disk clean and orderly will prolong your computer's life. The harder the disk needs to work, the more wear and tear it will suffer. Next week, I will discuss viruses, spyware and how to back up your PC.

Peter Le '10 writes this column in between bites of defragmented cookies. Contact him with desperate cries of help and/or comments at ple10@amherst.edu.