Spring Cleaning your OS (aka clearing out the downloads folder)

[EdwardTeach]

How good are you are at keeping your computer organised or uncluttered?

I am just about to finish clearing out my downloads folder. There are files that have been sitting in it for 6years! Not all of it was junk so it has taken me several hours to sift through it, and it was clearly something that I should have kept up to date with. My downloads folder sits in a 150gb hard drive that I pulled out of an old computer, so there was never really an issue of it running out of space, which encouraged me to completely ignore it. Loads of random useless stuff like W7 iso's and beta builds of w8 and w10. I also found quite a few game installers for games I forgot I own from outfits like Get Games, Gamersgate, gamefly downloads, direct2drive etc Regardless of an price differences and the benefit a plural market, it would have been much simpler to stick to steam!

 

[bledd]

CCleaner
Cleanmgr
Treesize


Manually hunting down old Nvidia drivers and Installer2 folders that Nvidia leaves around the place.

 

[mrk]

^nVidia driver installer has been good for some time now, a clean install is just that when upgrading drivers. It also uses the C:\NVIDIA folder for installation and storage.

Mine is organised to the eyeballs. I have had the same install since 2009 and simply upgraded it to 10 from 7 recently without a single problem.

For all intents and purposes it performs and looks as good as a fresh install.

My "maintenance" folder was posted in another thread a while back.

 

[Confused Stu]

Look at my downloads folder
Think "my word, there's a lot in there. Sure I don't need most of it anymore."
Realise if I downloaded it once, I can always download it again if I need it.
Select all files and go to press Delete button
Waver and consider how frustrating it will be if I can't find a download link to a file I know I had
Chicken out and don't delete anything
Buy bigger SSD/HDD and move downloads folder to it.

Repeat for years over many Windows installations and hardware setups.

 

[Disco_P]

I am super anal about hard drive space. Downloads is my go temp folder for putting stuff and gets cleared everytime I open it.

 

[Cern]

I am super anal about hard drive space. Downloads is my go temp folder for putting stuff and gets cleared everytime I open it.

Same. I use the Downloads folder as a 'holding pen' which gets cleaned out regularly, often daily and at least weekly. Anything I want to keep gets moved elsewhere, everything else gets purged.

 

[chaparral]

I can never seem to keep up with the cleaning of my Favorites folder..

Favorites folder

1,079 Files, 110 Folders

For every Favourite link I delete I seem to add 5 new ones..

 

[marc2003]

I'm always on top of everything so no spring cleaning is required.

 

[Cosimo]

I'm always on top of everything so no spring cleaning is required.

Same here.

 

[Stoner81]

My downloads folder is on a 2nd drive (2TB) and also holds files used for DVD's and various other things. I don't download as much as I used to do but still comes in handy.

Stoner81.

 

[bledd]

^nVidia driver installer has been good for some time now, a clean install is just that when upgrading drivers. It also uses the C:\NVIDIA folder for installation and storage.

Mine is organised to the eyeballs. I have had the same install since 2009 and simply upgraded it to 10 from 7 recently without a single problem.

For all intents and purposes it performs and looks as good as a fresh install.

My "maintenance" folder was posted in another thread a while back.

I delete the following..

1.1GB C:\Program Files\Nvidia\Installer2
0.8GB C:\NVIDIA
~1.5GB C:\Windows\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository\nv_disp* (must take ownership to do so, do not delete the most recent one, as you're using it.)
^multiple folders

 

[mrk]

Not much in those for me