Most people take time out of each week to ensure that their home is clean and organized. Some clean a little bit each day, while others decide to do it all at the end of the week. Just about everyone does a big, massive spring cleaning to cover all the things they might have missed during their day-to-day cleaning.

Just about everyone takes pride in ensuring that their homes are clean and in good condition, but there’s one device that’s often overlooked, and that’s the personal computer. These devices don’t get the same love, and that’s unfortunate because neglecting a computer can result in decreased performance and eventually hardware failure.

And that’s why we encourage everyone to celebrate January as National Clean Up Your Computer Month. A whole month dedicated to which people can show their personal computers some much-needed care.

The History Of National Clean Up Your Computer Month

Although computers had been around for decades and were used by the U.S. military, the space program, and other industries, the personal computer didn’t really hit the market until the mid-1970s. In 1974, the personal computer called the Altair was released, and this used Intel Corporation’s 8080 microprocessor.

This was a computer that was popular among many computer hobbyists but had limited appeal to the rest of the market. In 1977, the TRS-80 was released to the general public by Radio Shack, and it had a few more features that made it more appealing to the general public.

It used a BASIC computer language interpreter, had a full four kilobytes of RAM, and ran a Zilog Z80 processor that ran at 1.77 megahertz. It also had a 12-inch monitor, a power supply, and a cassette recorder that could record and load games.

On August 12, 1981, IBM would release its own personal computer. This is the personal computer that would revolutionize the market and become one of the most popular computer design standards in the world.

This would be the beginning of the trend of a computer being in just about every home. Unfortunately, while we’re well-versed in the history of the personal computer, we can’t say the same thing about the history of National Clean Up Your Computer Month.

It’s a holiday that’s only been around for a few years; we know that much, but we were unable to locate the exact year it was created or who first came up with the idea.

Observing National Clean Up Your Computer Month

The best way to observe this month is to clean up your personal computer. Use the disk cleanup tools provided by your computer’s OS to clean up the hard drive, use a specialized cleanup app such as AVG TuneUp, or get rid of files by hand that you no longer use.

This is a good time to uninstall programs that you don’t need and to use CHKDSK to test the integrity of your hard drive.