There's a Day for everything these days, it seems - on Friday, it was World Nutella Day (at least according to the twitter hashtags popping up in my feed), and today is Computer Cleaning Day (or so a more or less spammy newsletter from gmx is telling me).

Well, cleaning the computer is never a bad idea, especially if (like me) you are inclined to keep an extra copy of something just in case... or copy a file temporarily and then forget to delete the copy. Also Windows sometimes goes off to place a huge file or three on its disk space, just because it can.

So, just in case you find yourself in need of computer cleaning, here's some of the tools I use. They are all free as well (yay!) so there's nothing to lose:

For general cleaning up and removing of temporary files - CCleaner (the same company also offers a defragmenting tool that I also use). This can also clean up the registry (always do a backup first, just in case) and de-install programmes you don't want anymore, plus clean your autostart folder (helping make the computer start faster).

For finding and removing duplicate files - AntiTwin. This one also lets you filter for size or compare files only from two different directories, which can come in pretty handy.

For checking if there are any abnormally huge files hanging out on my computer (recently, it was a 1.4 GB text file, courtesy of Windows, called CBS.log), I'm using SequoiaView. This used to be downloadable from the TU Eindhoven, but it seems it's no longer available. My search engine tells me that TreePie would be an alternative, though. This programme shows you the size of the individual directories and files on your drive, so you can quickly see what is taking up a lot of space and what isn't.

A few days ago I already did a post on how to clean out old updates from Win7 and Win8, so if you find that your system has been grabbing a lot of space for itself, you might want to give that a try as well.

And, of course, cleaning the computer might also mean cleaning the fan - if your machine is rather hot or you can hear the fan labour as it's working hard, opening it up and getting rid of all that chaff and dust might be a good idea. There's usually instructions available somewhere on the net on how to clean the fan - and most machines aren't as hard to do as the one in this video: