How to clean up your computer, smartphone to get them ready for life after the lockdown

By Karan Bajaj

In the midst of the lockdown, you are probably using your computer and smartphone much more than usual, loading them with random data.

ET Wealth tells you how to clean up your devices for more efficiency.


A. ON YOUR COMPUTER
1. Sort your media

Most of us tend to copy a lot of content on our computers and then forget about it. Your computer might be holding videos, photos and audio in various folders, and you would not even know that it's there. We recommend using free analyzing WinDirStat (https://windirstat.net) to scan your computer hard-drive and find out which folders are taking the most space. You can even view files by their extension to help find the type of content you are looking for easily. Once you know their location, you can easily find relevant data under the video, photos or audio tags and move them to a folder of your choice for sorting.

2. Clean hard drives

When one is sitting at home and trying to pass time on the Internet, one tends to download various things or install apps to try out. This leads to the harddrive space being used up, which in turn can be a reason for slow computer performance. To clean the hard-drive, you can either choose to do it manually that is a time-consuming process or use softwares like CCleaner (www. ccleaner.com) or BleachBit (www.bleachbit.org).

3. Get to inbox zero

If you have been too lazy to clean up the clutter that is your inbox, then now is an excellent time to start. Start by assessing your inbox quickly. The fi rst thing you should get rid of are the social media notifi cations. Second, get rid of unwanted subscriptions/newsletter using tools such as CleanFox (www.cleanfox.io) or Subscription Zero (https://subscriptionzero.com). After doing these steps, you should be left with essential emails only, and you can quickly sort them by creating labels and marking them. In case you want to use an app to sort out emails, you can try our Sortd (www.sortd.com).

2. ON YOUR SMARTPHONE
1. Sort your gallery

Your phone gallery comprises not just photos shot using the camera but also photos shared via apps such as WhatsApp, Telegram, etc., screenshots as well as any other image fi les stored by third-party apps. To quickly sort out your photos, we recommend trying out Google Photos or A+ Gallery. These apps are great at sorting pictures in albums as well as for search, which in turn makes it easy to delete unwanted photos and videos.

2. Message inbox cleaning

Other than photos and videos, the other thing cluttering up your smartphone are chats and groups in various instant messaging apps such as WhatsApp. We recommend that you give some time to your commonly used apps, especially WhatsApp. Delete your old chats (any chat older than two months should be deleted ideally) and exit plus delete all WhatsApp groups that are inactive or not relevant for you. This will make it easier to browse through or search anything in the app as well as get rid of images/videos from the chat/group instantly.