Cleaning out the junk

I am a hoarder. I hate throwing away things. Invariably, when I am finally persuaded by my wife, the next day I could have used it. But when it comes to junk on my computer I am almost ruthless, no more so than in my email program. There can be a thousand reasons why computers slow down, but a common one is that the email program is clogged - and do I mean clogged. I looked over a friend's computer recently, and he had never deleted a single email. There were thousands of old files in there! And, of course, many of those files had big attachments, all of which the email program was groaning to try and cope with. Here's the drill: 1) Ditch everything from the In box, except those emails you must keep. And create folders in which to store them. 2) Go to the "Sent" section, and delete everything except, perhaps, the last few weeks worth. 3) Go to the "Deleted items" or "Trash" section, and delete everything there. (Stuff does not automatically vanish from the system when you hit the delete key in the In box. You have to manually clean it out from "Deleted...") 4) Compact your folders, by going to the File menu and then choosing "Folders", then "Compact all folders". Your computer will send you flowers for this.