Cleaning out the Hard Drive?

Hey, I'm not really good with computers..well I guess that's why I'm here

Over the past two years (since I've gotten my laptop), I've accumulated a whole mess of crap on my computer. I go to school, so generally I have tons of documents, pdf files, screenshots, etc. etc. littering my computer.

I've never been too careful with keeping my desktop clean.. and I do seem to recall once in a while just highlighting a whole mess of stuff and dragging it to the Macintosh HD file where it all just magically disappeared, conveniently out of my life.

Anyways, I recently went to Finder and clicked on "All Documents", and nearly had a heart attack when I saw the thousands of random documents, previous projects, etc. etc. I saw cluttered there. Ideally my laptop would be able to get rid of such useless things so I could have as much free space as possible, but when I dragged some of the stuff to trash, and emptied the trash, their icons still appeared in Finder.

Is there any way I can clear out this stuff?

thanks in advance
<3
Jackie

PS- It says I had to choose a "prefix" for this thread.. so I just clicked OS 10.3 although in actuality I have no idea if that is correct or not. I didn't think it would make too much of a difference though

Choose a prefix is just asking for what OS you have. You can find that out by clicking the apple in the upper left hand corner and then going to about this mac. Then in the middle it will display what version you have. In my case I have 10.5.8

I know I didnt answer your question, because I am new to having a mac. I am also curious to find out how to clear stuff out as well.

You can clear the stuff out by taking the time to organize your computer.

baggss:

Like I said, when I tried to clean out the files by dragging them to trash, they still remained on my hard drive.

You need to manually remove the files from the HDD to the Trash and empty it. Showing docs only created alias I guess.