TLC Tips of the Week:                          from Helen Olberg

This week’s tip applies to Windows.

Do you use your Desktop as a holding area for your current work files? Is your computer suddenly starting to run slower? Have you used the Disk Cleanup utility to remove unwanted temporary files and it didn’t make a difference?

The slowness could be the result of large files (not shortcuts) or too many files on your desktop. To determine their sizes:

1)      open My Computer and click the Folders button in the toolbar

2)      in the Folders column on the left side of the screen, click Desktop (at the top). The files and shortcuts will appear in the right column.

3)      Click the menu item View>Details to show the types and sizes of the files.

Anything larger than 1K can slow down your computer.

What can you do?

• Create a folder for the large files (Windows provided My Documents for that purpose) and move the large files into folders
• Delete unused files
• Delete shortcuts only if you don’t use those applications, or you use them so seldom that you can use Start > All Programs to start the application.

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