We're all decluttering our closets and basements in celebration of spring, but it's time for a break. Kick back on the couch, pull up your Android phone, and act like you're still being productive by giving it some spring cleaning of its own.

Reclaim Drive and SD Card Space

Most Android devices have two different storage spaces: your internal space (where apps are stored) and your SD card (where your music, photos, and many of your apps' settings are stored). The SD card is easy to clean up—just delete any music, photos, and videos you don't need. If you see any folders that look like settings for apps you've removed, you can delete those too. If you're rooted (which is really easy to do), you can even use an app like previously mentioned SD Maid to clean up all that cruft for you.

Cleaning up your internal storage is also pretty simple: just uninstall unnecessary apps. Chances are you have a few apps you don't use anymore, not to mention games you don't play—they'll take up the most space—and you can just uninstall them from the Play Store to free up that space and, hopefully, speed up your phone a little bit. If your phone is starved for internal storage and you can't spare any of your hard-earned apps, you can try moving them to your SD card instead. This will free up that internal space and speed up your phone, but keep all your apps close at hand. To do this, just head to Settings > Applications > Manage Applications. Select an app, and tap the "Move to SD Card" button to move it. Some apps won't have this ability, but you should find that lots of your space-hogging apps have no problem living on your SD card. You can read more about this process here.

Give It a Battery Boost

Android phones in particular are notorious for sucking the life out of your battery. If you haven't dug through your settings in awhile, this is a good time to make sure you're getting the most out of your battery as possible. This means turning the brightness down, the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth off when not in use, and turning off any eye candy (not to mention uninstalling apps that constantly use up your data). Tweak these settings yourself or automate them with a program like Tasker or JuiceDefender for an easy, hassle-free battery life boost. I'm always an advocate of getting a second battery, too—just keep it in your glove box or in your desk drawer for those emergencies where your phone is about to die.

Speed It Up with Some Settings Tweaks

If your phone is a bit older, or it's just feeling sluggish, there are a number of things you can do to make it feel a little smoother. Trying a new home screen launcher is always good for a bit of speed, as is lowering your number of home screens and ditching all those widgets. If you're rooted, you can even overclock or install a custom ROM for even more speed. And, if you really want to get technical, there are some advanced settings you can play with to eke every bit of speed out of your phone possible. Just don't use a Task Killer, whatever you do (unless you're on a really, really old version of Android—like, 1.6 old). For more info on how to speed up your phone, check out our in-depth guide.

Remove and Clean Your Case (If You Use One)

Of course, the inside of your phone isn't the only thing that needs cleaning. If your phone has gotten a bit dirty over the past year—which is even more likely if you have a dirt-trapping case on it—you might want to take it off and clean it up. The case shouldn't be too hard to clean, but make sure you don't clean your phone with anything that'll harm the screen. We've gone through how to safely clean and disinfect your gadgets before, so check out that guide for more info.

Unfortunately, Android devices are finicky, and can take a lot of maintenance to work well—especially the older ones. Be sure to check out our more in-depth guides above, and you should be able to get your phone running as optimally as possible. Got any maintenance tips we left out? Share them with us in the comments below.

With the sun shining and bees buzzing in celebration of spring you've likely started decluttering your closets and basements. If you need a break from all that indoor work, it might be time to step away and do the same for your iPhone. Here are some easy tips to give your trusted iPhone a spring cleaning of its own.

Reclaim Hard Drive Space

Generally, cleaning up your iPhone (or iPod Touch, or iPad) is a pretty straight-forward process where you check and tinker with your hard drive consumption. We haven't seen a hard statistic for how much space it's good to keep free on your iPhone, but as a general rule, it's good to leave at least 500 MB-1GB of free space when you can. This frees up enough room for apps to store data so you don't have to worry about crashes.

If you're running short on data storage on your iPhone, it's time to clean up and take a look at which apps are taking up the most space and why. On your phone, tap Settings > General > Usage. Here you'll find a list of your apps and how much space they're taking up.

In the screenshot on the right you can see that the Camera+ app is taking up 273 MB of storage. Why? It has its own built-in camera roll. This means the app is storing a second set of photos on top of the default photo app. Tap through each of your apps that are taking up a lot of space and you'll likely find a few more offending apps. Twitter, for instance, is a 13.5 MB app, but somehow manages to take up 383 MB of documents and data.

The solution? For apps like cameras you can go into the app itself and delete all the extra pictures. However, for Twitter your only option is to delete and reinstall the app. Once you do, the usage will drop to around 10 MB and start climbing up again over time.

Overhaul the Settings on Your iPhone

If your iPhone is struggling with battery life the easiest fixes are available in your Settings menu. We've gone through a the biggest offenders on your iPhone's battery life before and disabling the following settings can increase your battery life significantly:

• Push notifications for email (Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars).
• Push notifications for apps (Settings > Notifications).
• Location Services (Settings > Location Services).
• Disable Ping (Settings > General >Restrictions > Ping).

You can enable and disable most of the above settings on a per-app basis, so if you like having one or two apps sending you notifications you can keep them, but you don't need notifications for everything.

Overhaul Your Settings in iTunes

It's a good idea to take a look back at your iTunes syncing settings when you're cleaning up your phone. This is especially the case if you've started using alternatives to the default apps. For instance, if you've picked up our favorite podcast manager for iPhone, Downcast, you don't need to continue syncing the podcasts you download in iTunes at the same time.

The same goes for calendars, email, contacts, and the rest of the default apps. Uncheck any boxes that don't apply to you to help speed up the syncing process. For instance, if you don't use the default calendar you have no reason to sync it every time you plug in your phone. The same goes for Safari bookmarks, contacts, and mail.

Uninstall Unnecessary Apps

A lot of iPhone users are a bit addicted to apps. We've gone over a few ways to clean up your app usage by creating a most used page and a second holding bin page to test new apps. If you're the type to download and try tons of apps on a daily basis it's probably necessary to clean up your home screen and take a close look at all the apps you didn't end up liking. Delete them and free up hard drive space and declutter your home screen in one simple step.

Remove and Clean Your Case (If You Use One)

We've shown you how to clean and disinfect your gadgets before and if you're busy optimizing the insides of your iPhone, you might as well clean up the outside too. This is especially important if you use a case because over time dust and dirt get trapped in-between the case and iPhone. The dust can end up scratching the back of your iPhone if you're not careful. If you have a rubber case you can clean it with a solution of water and Windex.

In general iPhones don't need a lot of maintenance, but hard drives fill up quickly and that's the biggest cause of problems further down the line. As always, when you're cleaning everything above don't forget that a good old hard reset (hold home button and power button until it restarts) can do wonders for your iPhone's speed. Have any spring cleaning tips we left out? Share them with us in the comments.

Flowers are blooming and birds are chirping, which means it's time to start your yearly spring cleaning extravaganza. While you're emptying your closets, decluttering, and getting rid of the bloat in your life, why not do the same for your computer? Here are some simple, easy to follow tips to give your trusted Windows PC a little spring cleaning of its own.

Clean Up Your Hardware

We'll start with the outside of your machine, since you probably have all those cleaning products out for your household cleaning anyway (right? right?). Turn it off, unplug everything, and find an open area where you can easily reach everything. Whether you have a laptop or a desktop, your main priority is probably going to be the keyboard and mouse or trackpad. Luckily, you can clean them pretty easily with just a few household objects. If they're looking a little greasy, you can always clean them up with a Mr. Clean magic eraser, too.

You'll also want to get inside your computer's case and clean any dust out of the fans to keep everything running cool and quiet. We've shown you how to do this on a desktop before, and all you need is a little compressed air to do a pretty thorough job. Laptops, unfortunately, usually require a lot more work. You'll have to refer to your computer's instruction manual for more information on how to take it apart.

Tame Your Cable Clutter

As you head back to your desk to replace your newly-cleaned computer, take some time to organize your cables first. We've shared a number of ways to do this, from simple cable shortening techniques to full workspace solutions. I can personally vouch for both the rain gutter method and the IKEA Signum cable manager, though you can experiment with your workspace to see what works best. If you're using a laptop, slapping a couple binder clips on your desk is just about the greatest way to save them from falling on the floor whenever you go mobile, too.

Get Up to Date

Alright, so you've plugged your machine back in at your pristine workspace, and now it's time to get down to the good stuff: software. Before you do anything else, head to Windows Update and make sure all your software is up to date—drivers, service packs, security updates, and so on. Unlike our Mac guide, I don't recommend you upgrade to Windows 7 if you aren't already on it. With Windows 8 on its way for an October release, upgrading to Windows 7 now just seems like a waste of money. If you're on 7, great—you're running the best version of Windows yet—but if you're on XP or Vista, hold off for just a few months. Even though Windows 8's metro interface isn't that great, it contains a number of other improvements (like speed increases) that are worth waiting for.

Uninstall Unnecessary Apps

If you've followed our advice about being conservative with the apps you install, you shouldn't have too many unnecessary ones floating around—but no matter how careful you are, it's bound to happen. Skip Windows' built-in Add/Remove Programs dialog and use something like Revo Uninstaller for quicker, more thorough uninstallations. This is also a great time to de-crapify your printer or scanner setup, as it undoubtedly contributes a few unnecessary apps to your hard drive.

You might also want to take a look at your startup items in msconfig and uncheck options you don't need. This'll decrease your computer's boot time significantly, not to mention free up a few resources. If you're having trouble deciding what to disable, we highly recommend checking out previously mentioned Soluto, which will help guide you through the process.

Reclaim Hard Drive Space

If you're starting to run out of space on your drive, it's time to take a really good look at what might be causing it. That means ditching Windows' built-in Disk Cleanup app (which is fine, but probably won't net you a ton of space savings) and check out something like WinDirStat or Disk Space Fan. They'll show you exactly what's taking up so much space on your machine, organized by folder, file type, and more. Armed with that information, you can start deleting stuff you don't need and getting some of that disk space back. For more information, check out our feature on how to analyze, clean out, and free space on your hard drive.

Do Some Maintenance and Optimize Your System

Now it's time to really dig in and start cleaning up the cruft that can slow down your machine. If you don't already have the fantastic CCleaner maintenance tool, download it now and run through its cleaning process. This should clean up some of those extra caches, temporary files, log files, and other things strewn about your system. While you're at it, set it to run on a schedule so you don't have to worry about it ever again.

Apart from that, the only maintenance you need to do (besides the other things mentioned in this post) is keep your antivirus program turned on and up to date. We recommend Microsoft Security Essentials: It's good at killing viruses, and dead simple to use. Most users shouldn't have to do much more than this—Windows 7 users don't need to defragment, clean their registry, mess with Windows prefetching, or do anything else you've been told to do over the years. Check out our guide to Windows maintenance for more info.

Back Up Your Refreshed PC

Lastly, it's time to back up your newly cleaned PC. Hopefully, you had a backup system in place before this whole thing, but if not, we recommend setting up a bulletproof, offsite backup system with CrashPlan. Once you set it up, you never really have to think about it again. Alternatively, you can always just back up to an external drive using the built-in Windows Backup—I personally use this to back up to my NAS—but we'd still recommend backing up your super important files to something like Dropbox, since this won't protect you from things like fires, earthquakes, drive failures, or anything else that could destroy your backup.

Alternative: Do a Clean Install

It's worth mentioning, since it's such a popular option, that some people just prefer to reinstall Windows every once in a while to keep everything running smoothly. This is totally fine—I do it myself, in fact, just because I'm a bit OCD that way—but you really don't have to. As long as you take care of your computer, it should run just as quickly, smoothly, and cleanly as a freshly minted installation.

If you do want to do a clean install, then I highly recommend checking out how to customize your Windows installation with RT Se7en Lite and create the OS of your dreams. You can remove unnecessary Windows components, add Service Pack 1 to your installer, and even automatically install all your favorite apps in one fell swoop (though you could always use something like Ninite, too). As you go through the process, be sure to check out our Lifehacker Pack for Windows to make sure you get all the essential apps installed on your new machine.

That's all there is to it. Windows doesn't need quite as much maintenance as it did in the old days, but there will always be a few things you can do from time to time to keep it clean and fast. Have any spring cleaning tips we left out? Share them with us in the comments.

Windows/Linux: Papercrop is free, simple utility that automatically restructures PDF files to fit more comfortably on small smartphone and eBook reader screens.

Many PDFs strain our eyes with oversized margins and multiple columns that turn reading them on small screens into a a silly-looking dance of finger tapping and screen pinching. Papercrop attempts to rectify this problem by recreating PDF files with smaller margins and larger, more readable text.

The app works its magic by identifying the different pieces of content on each page, then putting each of these pieces on pages of their own to maximize the size of the content. This means you may end up with a few pages with nothing but a large page numbers, but mostly you'll see each column of text given its own page and expanded to fill the margins. The output isn't perfect, but papercrop does offer a dizzying array of customization options to tidy your final product up a bit.

Papercrop | Google Code