1 Clean up your hard drive清理你的硬盘
The more junk you have cluttering up your hard drive, the longer it takes for your system to access the data it needs—and that's a great reason to regularly scan your folders and toss out files and programs you don't need, or move them somewhere else to make more room.
你硬盘上积累的垃圾越多,你的系统找到需要数据的时间就越长——这就是定期检查文件夹设置和移除不需要的文件和程序的原因,或者将它们放到其他地方,以给
电脑留出更多空间。
One easy (and relatively cheap) solution, says Becky, is to buy an external hard drive for your music, photos, and videos, which can hog a surprisingly large amount of disk space (particularly when it comes to HD-quality TV shows and movies). You can find 500GB external hard drives
online for as little as $50, while plenty of 1TB drives (or 1,000 gigabytes) sell for south of $100. Most USB 2.0 external drives are plug-and-play, meaning you just plug them into your PC's USB 2.0 port and you're ready to start dragging and dropping.
一个简单(又相对便宜)的解决方法,在贝奇看来,就是为你的音乐,相片和视频购买一个去外接硬盘,它能保存让你惊讶的大量硬盘空间(尤其是在高清电视节目和电影时代时)。在网上,你会发现一个能容纳500GB的外接硬盘只需要50美元,同时还有很多可容纳1TB的移动硬盘(即1000GB)正在销售,这意味着你只需要把它们插入电脑的USB 2.0接口即可,而且还可以随时更换它们。
Another options: online storage sites, such as Dropbox and Carbonite.
另一个选择:使用在线存储网站,比如“Dropbox”和“Carbonite”。(译者注:类似中文网站中的“115网盘”等)
Becky also recommends dumping any old programs that you no longer use. For Windows, click the Start menu, open the Control Panel, and select Add/Remove Programs (or "Uninstall a program" in Windows 7). Mac users can look in the Applications folder, which you can open in the Mac OS X Finder by clicking the Window menu and clicking Applications. See a program you simply never use anymore? Consider tossing it in the trash—although again, never throw away an application without knowing what it does first.
贝奇还推荐卸载一些你已经不再使用的旧程序。对Window用户,单击“开始”菜单,打开“控制面板”,选择“添加或删除文件”(或Window7中的“卸载程序”)。苹果机的使用者们则可以找到“应用文件夹”,在那里,点击“窗口”菜单和“应用”按键后,你可以打开苹果操作系统查询。找到你一个基本不用的程序了吗?考虑把它扔到垃圾桶吧——再次强调,不要删除一个你不知道是什么的程序。
2 Defragment your hard drive重新整理你的硬盘
Your computer's hard drive is a lot like a closet: the more cluttered it is, the longer it takes to find stuff. One of the easiest (and most effective) ways of tidying up your hard drive is to defragment it, a process that involves consolidating scattered blocks of data into a larger chunk, resulting in bigger swaths of free disk space.
你电脑中的硬盘已经更像一个橱柜了:它越是乱,找东西所花的时间就越长。让你的硬盘变整洁,有一个最简单(也是最有效率的)的方法,那就是重新整理它,帮助整合分散的数据区块成一个大块,使你拥有更整齐的列表和更多空间。