5 Steps to Cleanup Your Computer

Posted on 10. Jul, 2009 by Bhavishya Kanjhan in How To

1. Map Your Used Hard Disk Space

Just how you would clear clutter in an offline environment, you need to determine what is taking up the space. Windirstat lets you map your harddisk and visualize exactly that to give you a better understanding of your computer.

2. Uninstall Old Applications

Quite often we tend to install an application to serve a one-off purpose and forget about it. I’m definitely guilty of that. These applications if uninstalled can free up vital space on your hard disk as well as improve registry performance (this we’ll see later) to show an overall improvement in response time of your machine.

Go to Add/Remove Programs (XP and below) or Programs and Features (Vista, 7) and uninstall the applications you don’t use anymore. I would advise keeping the paid applications installed, as they may have complicated licensing policies, but remove the free ones. You can always download and reinstall them.

3. Clear Temporary Files

You’d be surprised how much space temporary files can take up on your system. The number can run into gigabytes. These files are left behind by installers, temporary caches, backup files, etc.

Download and install CCleaner which is a free utility to delete temporary and unused cached files to clear up vital space on your computer. The Cleaner option will analyze and tell you how much free space you get back. Then press the button Run Cleaner to delete the temporary/cached files to recover it. Alternatively if you’re feeling brave just hit Run Cleaner straight away.

4. Clean Registry

The way Windows is designed it reads and writes a lot of settings from and to the Registry. Thus it becomes necessary to keep your registry clean. Unfortunately once you’ve installed/uninstalled a lot of applications, orphan registry entries are left behind, slowing down your system unnecessarily.

CCleaner also includes a Registry Cleaner which helps you clean and fix your registry. It’s extremely important you take a backup when modifying your registry as there may be the odd case of a valid and essential registry key being deleted.

Click Scan for Issues to run a check on the registry for invalid entries. CCleaner will then display the problem and where it lies. When you click Fix selected issues the application will display a prompt asking you if you want to backup your registry. Take a backup at this point and save it at a location you will remember for later. Upon doing that hit Fix All Selected Issues and that should clear up the problems.

5. Defrag Your Machine

Now that you have cleaned up your system it is important to defrag your hard disk. This puts your regularly accessed files/folders closer together and moving the empty space in another block instead of full/empty/full/empty chunk that may exist because of files/folders which we deleted in the earlier steps. By putting the used clusters together you can improve response times considerable.

Follow the guide by our very own Brian Ross to setup an automatic defrag schedule

And, that’s it. Run these 5 steps every couple of months to keep your PC in a good, clean and quick working order.

(By) Bhavishya tries to be an early adopter, but being a non-earning, full-time student has its constraints. When he’s not on the computer (like that ever happens), he tries to practice a bit of Digital Photography. His personal technology blog can be found at Kanjhan and photoblog at The Funk Eye.

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4 Responses to “5 Steps to Cleanup Your Computer”

JP.Thompson

10. Jul, 2009

Another way to *really* clean, even though it may not speed things up, is to use FileShredder (http://www.fileshredder.org/) to delete traces of old data in the free space on your hard drive.

Also, some files may resist deletion, and require a handy utility, called Unlocker (http://ccollomb.free.fr/unlocker/), to be released. However, you should only use that if you know the file can really be deleted, and YMMV.

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Zxscooby

10. Jul, 2009

6. Install Linux

A really good way to remove unnecessary bloat from your computer is a common utility called Linux. You will no longer
have to worry about viruses, and registry problems will be a thing of the past. It really speeds up older hardware and never requires de-fragmentation. Your computer will thank you.

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Indus Creed

21. Aug, 2009

Well Linux is still not user friendly like windows is. I mean the driver installation part is an absolute nightmare.
Yes once properly configured linux works well, But if you have a lot of legacy hardware like I do and also use older software then Linux is definately not for you.

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Harry Belafonte

22. Aug, 2009

Who says winblows is user friendly? I don’t call applications crashing and computers locking up in the middle of whatever i’m doing “user friendly”. Or having a harmless website bring down my entire computer, install malware and mess up my registry “user friendly”. I can’t tell you how many windows computers I’ve had to fix for people because they can’t figure out how to get it working again. And I’ve converted a few to linux or mac and guess what, haven’t had a single problem since.

What legacy hardware do you have? I have an 8 year old AMD machine and a 5 year old laptop that run linux perfectly. And what “old software” do you really use? If you can’t find an open source alternative than it’s probably not useful anyway. You can also run a lot under wine and/or VM. Usually people that bash linux for not being easy are the ones that have never tried it.

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