Isn’t it frustrating? There you are busily doing whatever on your brand new computer with everything going like the wind. Then over time it gets slower and slower!

Why does it?

Well actually there’s a good choice to choose from, ranging from programs which don’t uninstall completely right through to dust getting into the innards. There is one reason that you don’t come across often - a totally full hard drive!

It’s actually a bit of a “chicken and egg” story and to understand it properly it helps to understand how laptop computers are often set up by the manufacturer.

Historically the hard drive in laptops have been electronically changed so that the computer thinks there are two drives (C and D) rather than one (C). The intention is that you install Windows and programs on C and save things (documents, music, pictures or whatever) on D.

Unfortunately, nobody tells Windows about this. As a result Windows keeps the “Documents” folder on C and happily keeps filing everything you save there. The result? One very full C drive and one very empty D drive!

When you finally realize what’s happened you then start to move files from C to D, trying to free a bit of space up. An excellent idea too.

But. If you are not very careful it is perfectly possible to get almost as confused as Windows and end up not copying from C to D but copying from C to C - with the end result that all you do is duplicate the files and fill the C drive to capacity. Which, you guessed, slows the computer down even more!!

The moral of the story? Always make sure you know exactly what you are moving from where to where. It is always much to easy to be overcome by Windows’ efforts to “help”.  If in any doubt right click on the file or location in-question and then left click on “Properties” at the bottom of the window which has just opened. Somewhere (and yes it does move around at the whim of Windows) will be a full listing of where the file or location is on your computer.

What does it look like? Say we are checking up on the location of a called “fred” which is in the “My Pictures” folder, which is in the “User” folder which is on drive C, then the location details would read “C:\User\My Pictures”.

Which goes to prove that a Right Click opens a whole lot of options, more of which next time.