Unsync Accounts You No Longer Use

If you don’t remove old accounts and services from your devices, you may compromise their performance and your privacy. Edward Munn explains how to deal with old configurations.

- Edward Munn

Remove printers you no longer use from your PC

Printing a document in Windows can be unnecessarily confusing if you still have old printers you no longer use installed on your PC. To remove a printer from Windows 10, open Settings and click Devices, ‘Printers & scanners’. Click the printer you want to get rid of, then select ‘Remove device’. In Windows 7, open the Control Panel and click ‘View devices and printers’.

If you have any problems with this method, try using the Windows program-removal tool to manually uninstall any software related to the printer. To do this, press Windows+R and type appwiz.cpl. Click the program you want to remove and select Uninstall.

To make sure you’ve uninstalled the drivers for the printer, press Windows+R, type devmgmt.msc and click OK to open Device Manager. Click the Printers button, then right-click the device you want to remove and select Uninstall.

Disconnect old Android devices from Google

If you leave your Google account logged in on an old Android device, your private data is visible to anyone who gets their hands on it. Thankfully, removing a Google account is very simple and you don’t need to wipe the device completely to do so.

Open the Settings app on the device, scroll down and tap Accounts, then Google. Choose the Google account you want to remove and a page will load displaying its Sync settings. Tap the menu button (or More) from this menu, then choose ‘Remove account’.