The more use your laptop, the more clutter it collects over time. And there will come a time when your laptop has become so slow that you will wonder whether this can still be remedied.
Cleaning your laptop Registry will partly solve this problem. Because the clutter on your laptop takes up resources and space, which your laptop desperately needs while working with it. The 4 parts we focus on when cleaning are the hard drive, Windows, internal memory and web browser.
What’s the best way to clean your laptop Registry?
Sie können alle Arten von Apps herunterladen, um Ihren Laptop zu reinigen. CCleaner ist zweifellos das bekannteste davon. Sie können Ihren Laptop in der Tat gut mit CCleaner reinigen. Und es ist eine Version verfügbar, mit der Sie Ihren Computer kostenlos bereinigen können.
Other apps available for free and available in market that can provide good cleaning services are:
- IObit Advanced SystemCare
- Avast Cleanup
- Windows Storage Sense
- CleanMyPC
An important disadvantage when using apps to clean up your Laptop Registry is often that you do not know exactly what such software does. For example, leaving certain unnecessary files behind and happily taking up precious disk space.
Moreover, there are often functions in such an app that can only be used in the paid version.
In addition, CCleaner would also like to clean the Windows registry, for example. Because that would also make the computer faster. In practice, however, it does not make the computer noticeably faster.
In addition, cleaning the registry does not always go well. Something that can lead to an unstable operating system that malfunctions and crashes. Problems with the registry can also cause the computer to take longer to start up and/or shut down.
A damaged registry can only be repaired by reinstalling Windows . And that’s a pretty serious operation.
Beware of fake apps!
There are also various fake apps available that promise you everything, but that mainly try to knock your money out of the pocket. An example of such an app is PC Cleaner, which is very similar in name to the aforementioned CCleaner app.
Once PC Cleaner is installed and started on your PC, it will tell you that all kinds of junk has been found on your PC. This can of course be removed, but only once you have paid for the software.
In summary, not all apps that allow you to clean your laptop do what they promise. And so to speak, you also do not know exactly what is and what is not being cleaned up for you.
Manually clean your computer in 9 steps
When you decide to manually clean your computer, you know what you are doing and which files and programs you are removing. You also know what you have disabled to clean the internal memory of your computer.
This way you get a much better insight into what you are doing and which cleaning actions improve your laptop the most when you perform them.
We are now going to see which 9 steps you have to go through to completely clean your laptop.
Step 1: Get an overview of all the clutter that is on your laptop
If you want, you can easily get a decent overview in Windows of the clutter that is on your laptop. This goes like this:
- Press the key combination Windows key + I to open Settings .
- Click on the System section.
- In System, click the Storage section.
- You will now see an overview of the locations that take up the most disk space. In at least 2 of those locations you will find files that you can throw away and that can yield a lot of free disk space. Those locations are: Temporary Files and Apps and Features.
- We’ll come back to the Apps and features section in a moment. First click on the Temporary files section to get an overview of the temporary files that are on your laptop.
- In the overview you will notice that the Recycle Bin is not checked. Check this if you are sure that there is not something in the recycle bin that you would have wanted to keep. The same goes for the Downloads folder if you’re using Windows 10.
- Click the Delete Files button to delete all temporary files.
Step 2: Continue to clean up temporary files
Windows, in particular, uses a lot of temporary files. And even though we’ve just deleted temporary files, they’re far from all gone from our laptop. You can make temporary files that are still on your laptop visible as follows:
- Press the Windows key + R key combination to open the Run section .
- In the input box, type: temp and then press Enter.
- This will open the Windows Temp folder . In this folder there may just be a lot of temporary files that you can delete with confidence. Press the key combination Ctrl + A to select all files in the Temp folder . Then press the Delete button.
If temporary files are still in use, Windows will notify you that these files cannot be deleted. Simply skip deleting these files.
The result of this action will be an (almost) empty Temp folder .
Step 3: Clean up more temporary files
In addition to a folder where Windows stores its temporary files, which we just cleaned up, there is also a folder with temporary files that are created during our work on the laptop.
Again, that can be a decent collection of files that can provide the necessary free space on the hard disk. To clean this folder, we proceed as follows:
Press the Windows key + R key combination to open the Run section .
In the input box, type: %temp %, then press Enter.
This will open the [User] AppData Local Temp folder . Again we can select all files in the folder with the key combination Ctrl + A. Pressing the Del(ete) button will again delete all files in the folder, with the exception of the temporary files that are in use.
Step 4: Clean up program data folder
Another folder where Windows throws a lot of junk is the Prefetch folder. This is where data about the apps we use is stored. So that an app, for example, when we use it again next time, will start faster.
That’s nice when we use an app a lot, but it can also cause a lot of clutter. Especially if you have been using the laptop for quite some time.
How to clean up the Prefetch folder:
- Press the Windows key + R key combination to open the Run section .
- In the input box, type: prefetch and then press Enter.
- This opens the Prefetch folder . Again with the key combination Ctrl + A we can select all files in the folder. Pressing the Delete button will also delete all files in the folder this time, with the exception of the temporary files that are in use.
Step 5: Empty Recycle Bin
Even though we’ve emptied the trash before, we’ll have to do it again now. Because all the temporary files that we just deleted are also in the recycle bin.
However, it is advisable to leave them there for a while, until you are sure that everything still works as it did before. If something is wrong that doesn’t seem right, you can restore the temporary files you just deleted to solve the problem.
The chances of this being necessary are slim. But you never know.
You can restore files that are in the recycle bin by double clicking on the recycle bin and select files you want to restore. Then right-click and select the Restore command in the pop-up menu that opens.
You can manually empty the trash can by right-clicking on the trash can icon on the desktop. In the pop-up menu that opens, click on the Empty command.
Step 6: Remove Unnecessary Software
When we install apps on our laptop, we do it with the intention of using them. But it happens to all of us that we do not or hardly use an app in practice. As a result, we then forget the existence of that app.
At such a moment, an app does nothing but take up precious disk space. You can get an overview of all apps that are on your laptop in the following way:
- Press the key combination Windows key + I to open Settings.
- Click the Apps section.
- In the Apps section, click the Apps and features option.
- You will now see an overview of all apps that are on your laptop.
- In Windows 10, you can easily remove an app by clicking it and then clicking the Remove button that appears next. In Windows 11, on the far right side of the box that says the app, click the button with the three dots. Then click on the Delete option in the menu that opens.
Step 7: Clean up web browser
Sometimes your laptop seems slow while, if you pay attention, only the internet is really slow.
This could be because you have a lot of tabs open in your web browser, which takes up a lot of internal memory. But it could also be because there is a lot of clutter in your web browser that not only takes up unnecessary writing space, but also slows down your web browser.
You can quickly clean up browsing data and other clutter in most web browsers, including Google Chrome:
- Launch the web browser.
- Press the key combination Ctrl + Shift + Del.
- You will now see an overview of all data that is saved and how much free disk space they will yield if you delete it.
- Click the Clear Data button to clear any data that you believe can be deleted.
Incidentally, so-called Add ons, Toolbars and other extensions can also cause the necessary delay during the internet. It is therefore advisable to see whether you are using them. You can find out which extensions have been added to your web browser in the Extensions section in your web browser’s Settings.
If after cleaning up your web browser, browsing is still slow, uninstalling and reinstalling the web browser may also resolve the issue.
Step 8: Delete unnecessary files
If you work a lot on your laptop, you also store a lot of files. Everything you save on your laptop ends up somewhere on your hard drive. And it happens to all of us that after a while we don’t really know what’s on the hard drive of our laptop.
We can make all files on our laptop visible using Explorer. Obviously we shouldn’t mess with files on the local disk (C:) that are part of Windows, or of the programs we use on our laptop. So we leave them in peace.
What we can do is go through all the folders with personal files to see what they contain and whether we still need them. The personal files folders are:
- Documents.
- Downloads.
- Music.
- Pictures.
Step 9: Clean Up Internal Memory
The internal memory of your laptop can also become contaminated. This is due to apps, or parts of them, that start at the same time as Windows. This simultaneous startup with Windows is done so that the app can do its job in the background, without you having to start an app first.
That may seem useful, but usually working in the background is unnecessary. Which means it only takes up precious memory space.
Disabling such apps, and thus cleaning up the internal memory, is done as follows:
- Right click on the Start button in the taskbar.
- In the shortcut menu that opens, click the Task Manager item.
- In the Task Manager , click the Startup tab.
- You will now be presented with an overview of all apps, or parts of apps, that start with Windows.
- You can disable apps in the list by selecting them and then clicking the Disable button.
Disabling apps ensures that they no longer start at the same time as Windows, so that more internal memory is available after Windows starts.
When you have multiple user accounts on your laptop
You have now completed all the steps required to clean your laptop. However, if you have multiple user accounts on your laptop, and a lot of work is done on the laptop under those user accounts, you will also have to log in to those user accounts. In particular to go through steps 3, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 again.
Automatically keep your laptop clean in Windows 11
Cleaning your laptop takes, as you can see, quite a bit of time and attention. In Windows 11, however, you can make a setting that ensures that your laptop has to be cleaned less often. To do this, launch Settings and click Storage in the System section .
The Storage Management section displays the Storage Monitoring option. If you enable Storage Supervision, Windows 11 will largely handle cleaning up your laptop automatically.
This does not mean that you will never have to manually clean your laptop with this; it just needs to be less often.
