The first thing you want to do to clean up your hard disk is remove any programs you don’t want or need anymore. Excessive programs take up file space and when they’re running they slow down your computer. Most manufacturers will add programs to their software when they sell you a computer and if you don’t use them there’s no need to have them on your computer. You can remove those and any other programs you don’t want anymore pretty easily with the Add/Remove Programs tool that Windows provides.

Access your control panel by clicking on the Start button to bring up that menu. Once you’re in the control panel you should be able to find the Add/Remove Programs Icon. Clicking on this will bring up another window that will update with all the programs installed on your computer. Go through this list and highlight anything you want removed one at a time. When you highlight a program you will have a button that should say ‘remove’. If you click on that button Windows will remove that program for you.

Be careful here because your list will have some programs that are required to run your computer, whether it be for hardware of another program. Don’t remove anything that your not completely sure of until you research it and find out exactly what it’s for. If you don’t need it, get it off your hard drive. Removing unnecessary programs can free up some space on your hard drive and it will also stop any of those programs from running that you’re not using anyway.

Unfortunately, this tool doesn’t completely remove all remnants of a program from your hard drive, but I will show you later on how to get rid of those parts. When you’re done removing programs, move on to the next section in Disk Clean Up to continue on with this process.