Cleaning a hard disk can be accomplished in several ways; firstly you could delete files by hand, if that doesnt appeal, there are always software tools to help. Manual cleaning means going through the folders and then making a decision about which data files can go, and removing them as required. Because you examine each file manually the risks are less than running a cleanup program but this way can be tedious if many files exist. You can also make use of software tools that make delete/dont delete decisions based on fields such as the file accessed date, and make a list of the files to be cleaned out.

Improvements can be made in computer performance by cleaning up your computer. Any computer is potentially able to perform better the less files there are that need to be sorted and backed up on the computer in question. Any spare space that is recovered during cleaning can be put to better use. And defragmentation is more effective when the system has lots of free space to shuffle files around in. And with your private files cleared out it is much less likely that their contents can be read and mishandled by just anybody.

The world wide web reveals the depth of applications each of which approaches the issue of drive cleaning using their own techniques. Many of these fall into the internet cleaner category, and there are a number of these to choose from on software and shareware sites. There is usually much is more that that these software tools can do, many can also clean up free drive space, clean up porn files, find programs that are not properly licensed, and let you know how to recover your disk space.

Cleanup software packages can be easily classified. The most popular seem to be the hard disk cleaners such as the free CCCleaner software, that are used to get rid of useless files and folders and recover room on the disk. There are other tools that can protect your privacy, clean up internet tracks and get rid of the previously typed URLs from drop down lists stored as history within your browser records, software such as Privacy Eraser. Another type of utility is the 'porn remover', that is able to detect the exact source of pornography style images and movies or many other undesirable files and helps the user get rid of the ones that should not be there. One more group of cleaners comprising disk 'washing' software which rubs out existing files and data from anywhere on the disk so that it is not recoverable by any means.