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BOOT CAMP 314 (24/02/04)
SPRING CLEAN & UPGRADE, part
2
Following on from last week’s hardware valeting exercise it
is time to turn our attention to the jumble and clutter accumulating on your
hard disc drive. If your PC is more than six months old there is a fair chance
that between a quarter and a third of your hard disc is filled with detritus
left behind by Windows, uninstalled or unused programs, web downloads and
general rubbish.
This redundant data is
clogging up your system and slowing your PC down it could also harbour
potentially harmful files or viruses and result in all manner of conflicts and
crashes when you install new software.
Before you start make a
note of how much free space you have on your hard drive by going to My Computer
or Windows Explorer, right click on the C: drive icon and select Properties, to
see a simple pie-chart. Alternatively download a brilliant little freeware
utility called SpaceMonger, which provides a visual representation of what’s on
your hard disc; it is available from: http://www.werkema.com/
software/spacemonger.html.
Windows has several built-in cleaning and tune-up
utilities, which do a fair job and are safe to use, so we’ll start with them.
However, before we begin a few words of caution. If you have any irreplaceable
files or data that only exist on your PC’s hard drive then back them up. Only
carry out one procedure at a time and after each one reboot to make sure
everything is okay. If you have any doubts about whether or not to delete
something, leave it alone!
Disk Cleanup is on all
versions of Windows you’ll find it by going to Start > Programs >
Accessories > System tools. Drive C should be selected so click OK and a list
of file groups you can definitely remove will be ticked. There may be other file
groups shown unchecked but they are all uncontroversial and it is highly
unlikely that there’s anything you need to keep so zap the lot. Whilst the Disk
Cleanup window is open click the More Options tab. In all versions of Windows
the top two buttons take you directly to the Add/Remove Programs utility in
Control Panel. Use this opportunity to remove the dead wood but don’t forget,
uninstall only one program at a time and reboot after each
removal.
In Windows 98 & SE
the third Disk Cleanup option is to convert to the FAT32 filing system, which
makes more efficient use of disc space. It should be greyed out, indicating that
your drive has been converted, if not click the button and follow the prompts.
In Windows ME and XP the third option is to delete old System Restore files and
this is worth doing if your PC has been running smoothly for some
time.
You may have noticed
that one of the items Disc Cleanup purports to remove is Temporary Files. These
are files that Windows or other applications create and should automatically
remove, when they are finished with them. Sometimes this doesn’t happen,
possibly due to a crash or unexpected program termination and they get left
behind. To see what’s lurking on your PC go to Find or Search on the Start menu
(Files or Folders in Windows 9x) then in the ‘Named’ or ‘All or part of the
name’ box type ‘*.tmp’ (without the quotes).
Don’t be surprised if
there are several hundred temporary files occupying tens of megabytes of hard
disc space and you can almost certainly get rid of most of them – in fact many
will have nothing in them (0 bytes). Click the Date column label once or twice
to sort them by date with ones created today and currently still in use at the
top. These will be protected and cannot be removed. It’s safest to remove the
rest in batches of a couple of dozen at a time with a reboot in between each
session so use the keyboard shortcuts Shift + down arrow to highlight a line at
a time or Shift + Page Down for a page at a time then press the Delete key.
Don’t forget the regular reboots and don’t empty the Recycle Bin for a day or
two, just in case. See Tip of the Week for how to remove other types of
redundant files.
To see how much space
you’ve regained repeat the earlier steps to display the space usage pie chart or
launch SpaceMonger again. If after a day or two everything seems to be okay run
the Disc Cleanup utility again then follow that up by ‘defragging’ your hard
disc, to optimise the filing system. Defrag can be found in System Tools in
Accessories on the Programs menu.
Finally, for advanced
users I suggest running a Registry Cleaner utility like RegSeeker (http://www.hoverdesk.net/freeware.htm), which will weed out
unused and redundant entries. It has a backup facility so it is safe to use and
like SpaceMonger it is entirely free.
Next week – Spring Clean & Upgrade, part 3
JARGON FILTER
DEFRAG
Over time the files on a PC's hard disc drive become
disorganized - 'defragging' the drive restores order and speeds up reading and
writing data
FAT
32
File
Allocation Table -- the indexing system used by the PC to control where and how
data is stored on the hard disc. FAT 32 makes more efficient use of the storage
space and allows drives larger than 2Gb to function as a single
drive
WINDOWS 9x
Windows 95, 98, SE and
ME versions
TIP OF THE WEEK
Temporary (*.tmp) files
is only one of a group of files that waste space on your PC but rather than
removing them all manually try this freeware utility called HDCleaner. It is
programmed to look for the commonest type of junk files and space wasters and
you can add your own. As an added bonus it also identifies duplicate files and
cleans up your Run, Find, Recent and typed URL History logs, leaving your hard
disc squeaky clean. HDCleaner works with all versions of Windows, the download
file is just over 800kb and it can be found at: http://home.tiscali.de/kurtzimmermann/
hdcleaner_e.htm
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