How to Clean up Your Computer the Right Way

You can go through and manually remove old and unused software and files. Use the software's uninstall program or go into the add/remove programs in the control panel. This option has the advantage of keeping software that is up-to-date that doesn't need to be removed. After you remove software, go and look to be sure it didn't leave any files behind. You can also look for mpeg files as well as other video files as they often use a lot of space. Be sure to clean up music files. I once found a worm infecting a computer that used up huge amounts of space though a good anti-virus program should find this type of thing before it gets bad

You could double check to be sure you have everything you want saved and re-install using the install disks. Sometimes there is an option for this that will wipe the hard drive for you. What you'll end up with is something similar to when the computer was new. You'll have to update all the software from the install disk and re-install all your favorite programs. Also with install disks there is probably going to be some stuff you don't want that will have to be removed.

The only thing related to wiping a hard drive that would require 7 times is a secure wipe. Since you don't appear to be selling the computer or removing the hard drive, I don't see a reason why you would need to spend the time doing a secure wipe. For the really paranoid remove the drive and melt it down. New hard drives are fairly cheap.

If you play a lot of games or have a lot of games installed that you don't use, remove them. Some games use upwards of 5 install CD's and these can expand to nearly 10 gigabytes. Even worse is the install DVD's at 4.7 Gb that can expand to around 10Gb and more if there is more than one DvD. Just a few large games can quickly fill up a hard drive. The downside here is that you could start over with a clean install using the original disks and still end up in nearly the same spot as you are now. If this is the case, you may want to move to a larger hard drive rather than try to remove everything.

No matter which method you use, be doubly sure you have all your software keys and any files you want to keep backed up or written down somewhere. Even if you remove some software, you may want to put it back at another time. Also, depending on the method you use, deleted files could be hard or even impossible to recover using normal methods.