Organizing your computer benefits you, the user, and helps to speed up the computer itself. Organizing the files and folders in your computer helps you to know where your files are and enables you to retrieve them faster. It also increases the speed of your computer by allowing it to fetch specific files quicker.

General Organization
There are many simple ways of organizing that may help you to save time:

1. Group similar files into just one folder

2. Name each file appropriately – Many users can’t be bothered to do this and end up saving the file as “asd” or “qwert”. This becomes an incredible hassle when retrieving these files.
3. Keep all important documents in just one folder.
4. Delete unused desktop shortcuts
5. Instead of creating a whole new folder for one file, create a ‘Misc’ folder that all the others do not fit into

Start Menu
One of the most complicated but crucial places to organize is the start menu. Most programs will place a folder in the start menu with shortcuts to individual programs. Once enough programs are installed on your computer, it becomes annoying as well as tedious to have to sift through a seemingly endless list of files. Though organizing this Start Menu may a take a while, it certainly does pay off. You should see a general improvement immediately. Thankfully, there is some software that helps you to achieve this.

The Tidy Start Menu program will help you to put the start menu in order and make your work comfortable. Tidy Start Menu helps you to manage start menus when they are especially large. The program is essentially simple but effective nonetheless. Tidy Start Menu lets you group start menu files into general folders such as Music and Games in an easy manner. You will find that this becomes incredibly helpful when trying to find a specific program later on.

Disk Cleanup
The Disk Cleanup is used to delete unnecessary files on your computer that may be taking up space and processing time. Among these are old internet files and other temporary files. However, the Disk Cleanup utility is most effectively every other month or so as the unnecessary files tend to build up over time. Since most computers hardly ever run this utility, there will almost certainly be an increase in speed.

To access the Disk Cleanup Utility:

1. Click Start

2. All Programs
3. Accessories
4. System Tools
5. Click Disk Cleanup
6. You will then be asked to choose which drive to clean. Select your main hard drive (Usually named the (C drive).
7. Click begin
8. Once the search is complete, it will show you which files can be deleted. Check the ones you want to delete, and uncheck the ones that you want to keep.
9. It is safe to delete anything the search comes up with.

Defragmenting
Every time you install a program or download some software, bits of files and folders get thrown into your hard drive. They are never arranged properly. Over time, this starts to build up. As a result, your hard drive has to search around for fragments of a specific file just to retrieve and open that file. This process slows things down. Defragmenting is basically rearranging these ‘fragments’ on the hard drive to make it easier to retrieve. By doing this, data can be retrieved faster and files can be opened quicker.

Windows XP includes a utility to defragment your hard drive. To access it:

1. Click Start

2. All Programs
3. Accessories
4. System Tools
5. Click Disk Defragmenter
6. Select your main hard drive

Defragmenting may take some time, but it is well worth the wait. Try to defragment every month to keep your hard drive in order.