Spring is a wonderful time to renew your spirits; winter is over and the summer heat has not arrived. Spring flowers are showing in the garden and new leaves are taking shape on the branches. Yes, spring is a time for life's miracles.

Traditionally, spring is also a time for cleaning the house, garage, attic, and yards. For apartment dwellers, spring is a great time to pick through the closet. In our virtual lives, spring is a great time to clean out the cobwebs in the computers; removing duplicate files, archiving, and getting the drive organized.

Here is my list for the spring cleaning tasks:

·         back up files / clone hard drive & date time stamp!

·         archive emails, music, and movies

·         delete temp files

·         remove duplicates files

·         organize downloads directory

·         organize Documents folders

·         remove unused apps 

·         defrag drives

·         clone hard drive

Clone your hard drive. If you have not purchased Acronis True Image 11 Home, then now is the time. True Image is the best product for protecting your data. It is also the best product to help you recover your system after a hard drive crash.

Besides cloning the drive, I also keep an external USB hooked up and copy the My Documents folder. Lately, I have relied on Second Copy. My sister says I am lazy and this is very true. I prefer files automatically being copied rather than relying on my scattered brain. So, if you have not tried Second Copy, then there is a 30-day trial available. You won't be sorry.

After backup and cloning, now is the perfect time to sort through the movies and music, as well as archive all those important emails, and off-load any important files onto a DVD. In fact, Amazon allows a purchaser to make DVD copies of the digital downloads. Make sure you do this because movie companies are not always allowing Amazon to keep movies available all the time.

Delete the temporary files: Temp files build up with normal usage. As we surf the web, download files, and create our own documents, temp files are created. Go through and delete the files. I prefer to use ccleaner. This deletes temporary files and features a backup routine for the registry.

Remove duplicate files. As much as I try, duplicate files end up everywhere on my hard drive. While duplicate file removal applications exist, nothing seems to work for me, except picking through the files manually.

I love to download applications and give them a try. Unfortunately, this can make a mess. If you have not done so, delete the files in the download directory to make room for more testing.

My Document folder is always a mess. Imagine clothes all over the floor and this is how this folder appears. I am getting better. Subfolders now exist for the doctoral work, teaching, personal, and websites. Yet, files are not where they should be for fast retrieval. I spent today picking through them and moving files to better locations.

Now that files have been removed and moved, you will want to defrag the drive. Auslogics Disk Defrag is the best application. Download a trial version and you'll soon have a better performing system.

We are almost done with spring cleaning, there is only one more step and that is to clone the drive one more time. I wish you the best of luck in keeping your system humming along.