5. 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。

6. Turn off Mac Dashboard widgets

关掉苹果系统中的“仪表盘”工具

One of the more recent features in Mac OS X is the Dashboard—a layer of handy widgets that you can call up by clicking the Dashboard icon in the Dock. But while Dashboard widgets might be great for a quick check on the weather or to track the Dow, they also eat up a decent chunk of system resources.

苹果操作系统的一个最新特征就是“仪表盘”了——一个半透明图层的手动小工具，你可以随时通过点击“仪表盘”图标召唤它出来。但当你通过它们快速的查看天气或其他条目时，它们也在“吞食”着你的系统资源。

Do yourself a favor and deactivate the widgets you don't use all that often, Becky advises. Activate the Dashboard, then click the "plus" sign in the bottom-left corner of the screen; next, click the "X" in the upper-left corner of any widgets that you won't miss.

为你自己做件好事吧，贝奇建议说，把这个小工具移除，如果你用的不是那么频繁的话。激活“仪表盘”，点击屏幕底部左边的“+”号；然后点击任何你可以在右上角看到的“X"符号，你不会错过它们的。