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Spring Clean Your PC

June 25th, 2009 · by David Bradley >> 6 Comments

window-cleanerI’ve mentioned cleaning tools for Windows before, among them Crap Cleaner, more delicately known as CCleaner, which almost every time I run it (probably once a month) seems to find several hundred megabytes of rubbish and errant Windows Registry entries, which it cleans up automatically. SysCleanPro is another useful tool for getting rid of cobwebs and there are others that will empty your recycle bin, delete files in your temporary folders and clear out your browser cache. All worth running periodically to keep your PC in tip-top condition.

Another cleaning tool I heard about years ago, but had long since forgotten goes by the obvious name of Windows Clean Up! Running this tool not longer after a CCleaner session revealed I had 9005 files of a temporary nature hogging half a gigabyte of disk space.

windows-clean-up

Needless to say, I feel much better having swept those out. Although with a fairly new 250 gigabyte hard drive in my laptop, that half a gig is just a fraction of the available space, but clearing out unwanted files means you can run a more efficient machine as there are less fragments for other spring-cleaning tools such as defraggler to struggle with.

6 responses so far ↓

  • David Bradley // Jun 25, 2009 at 6:00 am

    Spring Clean Your PC – http://sciencetext.com/sb

  • Kim Woodbridge // Jun 25, 2009 at 4:52 pm

    Thanks for the reminder David. I have a lot of tasks scheduled like backups and stuff but I don’t for de-crapifying ;-)

  • David Bradley // Jun 25, 2009 at 6:03 pm

    Yeah, we all need to take a little to spring clean every now and then…of course best approach is to backup data, do full clean install, save disk image, and restore data.

  • Asdas // Dec 4, 2009 at 6:09 am

    I find the best thing to use is defragment of the hard drive, along with a reg cleaner, spyware, and avg anti virus. Its amazing that you only have to do this to a PC.

  • David Bradley // Dec 4, 2009 at 7:54 am

    Defragmentation is irrelevant on a flash drive and fairly irrelevant, they say, on an NTFS drive.

  • Ed // Dec 21, 2009 at 4:01 pm

    No wonder why I prefer a Mac. I have never had to ever do this to any of my mac laptops or desktops. Every single PC I must defrag at least once a year and every 2 years transfer all files over to a new hard drive and “format c:” the old one. Its a pain. Since I went to MAC never have to worry about anything other than trying to run MS programs.

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