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Pimp Your PC by 77.56%
April 21st, 2008 · by David Bradley >> 17 Comments
Tony Williams at ChemSpider let me know how he was getting on with my making room for more hard disk space tip. Very well, apparently. Once he’d cleared up some space he was then wondering about a quick and simple tool for defragmenting his disk to get all those data files into nice contiguous units to speed his computer up a little bit more. I recommend Auslogics Disk Defrag, but I’d also recommend Crap Cleaner, more subtly known as CCleaner, which clears up orphaned garbage on your hard disk (last time I ran it, I freed up 265Mb of space, which is useful.
The following video shows the basics of both CCleaner and Auslogics Defrag (oh, and AVG Antivirus and AdAware 2007, two other tools I recommend for personal use).
17 responses so far ↓
Andrew // Apr 21, 2008 at 3:37 pm
I love CCleaner, but I started hearing a lot of comments about registry cleaners doing more harm than good. So I looked for an alternative.
I use a nifty freeware utility called Revo Uninstaller. When I remove something (which I do a lot — always testing something), I use it instead of Add/Remove Programs. It finds *all* the crap left behind in the Registry and on the drive proper. And it’s a lot more than I expected.
So now I use that to keep the junk off in the first place, and CCleaner to remove temp files and other detritus.
Andrew’s last blog post..NYC schools and the Mac mistake
David Bradley // Apr 21, 2008 at 3:43 pm
I’ll check it out. I must confess I wrote this little post a while back and it’s simply been shuffled further down the queue as other stuff got ahead of it. As to alt uninstallers, I used to use a program that monitored what changed before you installed so it knew exactly what to remove when you uninstalled. If only we could be happy with what we’ve got…
db
ChemSpiderMan // Apr 21, 2008 at 4:27 pm
David..I now use Defraggler…
http://www.defraggler.com/
Seems to do the job and is priced “just right”
David Bradley // Apr 21, 2008 at 4:44 pm
Ah, yes, I meant to add in Defraggler to this post after we spoke t’other day by email. It’s much more adaptable, as it allows users to defrag individual files one at a time or in batches, which means you can choose the biggest files that are most fragmented, or files you use a lot that are split.
db
David Bradley // Apr 21, 2008 at 5:01 pm
Andrew. Just a quick follow up. I just now tried Revo and found it to be very effective. However, uninstalling and letting it clean up each app with all those confirmations is much slower than with CCleaner (I’ve never had reg problems using that). So my strategy is this. Backup registry. Uninstall apps using Windows. Run CCleaner to delete any orphans. Job done.
db
Farhaj // Apr 26, 2008 at 6:22 pm
I never knew that CCleaner could clear garbage data this quickly from the hard disk. I had been using other tools to defragmentand clean but they have not been so reliable and effective; this on certainly is going to do good job.
David Bradley // Apr 27, 2008 at 10:09 am
Yep, CCleaner and Defraggler are now the cleanup tools of choice for Windows users.
db
Farhaj // Apr 27, 2008 at 11:00 am
thanks for that David Bradley but I was wondering how do you manage to find out such effective and long lasting tools and materials?; I could never find out those that easily!
can you give me some clues or something?
David Bradley // Apr 27, 2008 at 2:57 pm
Farhaj, that would be telling, wouldn’t it
You’ll just have to keep coming to the site for your dose of computing tips.
db
Farhaj // Apr 27, 2008 at 4:03 pm
Alright as you say David, I will browse your site more often but you will have to keep your word that I will be expecting such informative and problem tackling tools from here in the future.
I will give a hint.. umm give out something relating to compression or something on zipping files.. Hope to hear more from you
David Bradley // Apr 27, 2008 at 7:06 pm
Hahahah! Funnily enough, I’ve got an item coming up about what you “should” use for zipping. If you subscribe to the site newsfeed I’m sure you won’t be disappointed
db
David Bradley // Jul 1, 2008 at 4:10 pm
Since CCleaner now comes with Yahoo Toolbar as part of its installation routine, I thought I’d check out alternatives. gHacks suggests iSysCleanerPro, which is also free, has no spyware and cleans out installation detritus too.
David Bradley // Jul 14, 2008 at 8:50 pm
Well, I did a side by side analysis of what CCleaner and iSysCleanerPro could clear out. A non-deleting CC scan found just 66 megabytes of garbage, whereas iSys turfed out 514Mb. So, I know which one is gonna get dumped.
PC // Jul 15, 2008 at 8:44 pm
Hi David,
Thanks for the info with the video, I like your video presentation, rarely find the tips including demo video.
Honestly I never used any registry cleaner yet, because Iam not having any bad PC performance .
maybe in the picture I will give it a try.
cheers
PCs last blog post..Close All Websites in Firefox with One Click
David Bradley // Jul 16, 2008 at 7:39 am
hi PC, you’ll never know how much performance you may be missing out on until you run a cleaner. Like I say, iSysCleanerPro seems to be the one to use in preference to CCleaner. One caveat, it will by default re-set all your MS Office settings and recent files lists.
Andrew M // Aug 18, 2008 at 2:49 am
Hey, im sorry if i sound uneducated or anything, but i am almost completely computer illiterate and i was interested inlearning about them, so i was wondering what exactly defragmenting and cleaning and all that has to do with a pc
David Bradley // Aug 18, 2008 at 1:55 pm
@Andrew – cleaning removes unwanted files giving you more space on your hard drive. Defragmentation consolidates wanted files, so that they’re quicker to access from your hard drive.