cleaning hard drives properly to boost performance

[dellhead]

hi there i have had my dell computer for four years now dell dimension 4550 p4 2.66 processor 512ram 120 gb hard drive i use this computer for internet,making music reason software and general office stuff in general i leave it turned on for a max of 5hours at one time 12 hrs ocassionly on a daily basis it refuses to give up on me which is nice as it is a very relibale computer i run windows xp home with all current updates and norton 2007 is latest antivirus and windows defender for protection i run disk drive clean up daily
and disk defrag often aswell as error checking for harddrive??????
????
i recently done both disk clean up then disk defragment afterwards then went to my documents and all the files the letters of files have turned blue
what is the reason for this i currently use 60%of hd the letters of files were black before i did this do i have a harddive problem???????

help would be appriciated cheers

 

[compaqman]

you have probally encrypted your files. That means , well lets say that a hacker tries to get into your computer and gets into all of your files if the files are encrypted then the hacker has a 91% chance of not be able to read your files.
so to put that in simple terms to encrypt your files means your computer can only read them it puts them into a code that only the computer can read

if you dont like them that way heres how to undo it

click and drag to select the encrypted files
right-click
click on proporties
click advanced
and un-click, encrypt contents to secure data

if none of this works then i'm sorry i wasted your time

 

[Geoff]

Blue folders and drives means that the folder is compressed to help save disk space. If you dont have much free space left, you should compress your files, but if speed is the highest priority, uncompress the folders by right click on a blue folder/drive and click properties.