Give Your Laptop and Smartphone a Spring Cleaning

 

PCWorld - It's officially spring, so why is your computer still moving like it's half frozen? After all those long winter nights surfing shady sites, it's no wonder. Here's how to give your most important devices a spring cleaning fit for a May Queen.

Clean It Out

The first thing you'll want to do is clear out the riff-raff—unused programs and browser extensions, obsolete registry entries, and expired permissions. Uninstall unused and under-utilized programs on your desktop and laptop systems, clear out forgotten apps from your mobile devices (Sorry, Angry Birds Rio). Give your registry a scrubbing with CC Cleaner, a free program for both Windows and Mac, that will clear old registry entries (for PCs) as well as empty recycle bins, zero out recent document lists, and erase a variety of browser information—Temporary files, history, cookies, download history, form history—from the major browsers.

Also be sure to take a look through your browser's extensions list and remove any rarely used features. The same goes for Google users: Go to your Google account's security screen, select the "Connected applications and sites" option from the bottom of the list, and nix any old devices that you no longer own or operate.

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Spring cleaning tips for your Android device

Learn how to do some spring cleaning on your Android device and improve your user experience.

Spring cleaning is about more than actual cleaning — it’s about getting a fresh start. The latter of these can simply mean changing things around so that the experience feels new. Here are some of the cleaning basics for your Android device, and also some tips on how to make other parts you can’t change feel a bit of that spring rejuvenation.

Clean out space for new stuff

 

 (Credit: Dropbox)

CNET - We all have too much “stuff,” as the famous comedian George Carlin told us, and chances are that you can afford to get rid of some of it.

-Remember that app you tried and didn’t like? Or the game your friend suggested that you couldn’t get into? Start removing Android apps and games you haven’t used or played in quite a while. If you change your mind later, just redownload them!

-Often, an app will create a folder and configuration file with user data that gets left behind after an uninstall. Grab a file explorer app like Astro File Manager, which will let you explore the data folders created by apps, to get rid of these.

-You may not realize it, but your Call Log and SMS history can eat up a more than healthy portion of memory. Cleaning them out will not only make these apps run more efficiently, but other apps will, too.History Eraser for Android can do the work for you, if you’re not sure how.

-If data consumption isn’t an issue, or you often find yourself on a Wi-Fi connection, there’s no reason you can’t move some of your files off your device to the cloud. Get your data migration started with apps like Dropbox and Google Music.

-The previous suggestions not enough to make your Android feel faster? There’s always the option of performing a Master reset on your device, which will erase ALL apps and data.

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