OK, there I am at BestBuy ready to buy a good “cleaner” for my hard drive. The first program I notice is something called Win Ultra Cleaner one Click . …read it . .looks good . .$29.99 . …then my eyes look at another program Norton 2002 Clean Sweeper . . . .same price $29.99. Both seem to give you the same service, though Win Ultra Cleaner promotes itself as better than Norton Clean Sweeper. So, I did quick search and wasn’t able to find much so o o o o, I come to you Teeming Millions with the following questions:
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[li]Which of the products better, i.e. Norton or Win Ultra?[/li][li]Is there another program you can recommend?[/li][li]Do they really wokr as far as cleaning those , , ,uh . .unwanted internet addresses from your computer?[/li][/list=1]
Cleaning software is pretty much a waste of money. You can get the same effect by clearing the history in Internet Explorer, setting it to clear temporary internet files at every close, and deleting the contents of your cookies directories. All of this is relatively easy to accomplish, you can find free guides and even free tools in various places around the net.
I don’t see how this will improve anything beyond a minor improvement in web page viewing. This won’t clean up garbage left by programs that don’t fully uninstall properly, which is much more damaging to PC performance.
I recommend reformatting your HD and reinstalling your OS every so often. It’s not that bad a procedure if you prepare properly by backing up your needed documents and getting your needed drivers beforehand (like for your video card and sound card, etc). I had to do it recently, and if I would have known I was going to get such a performance boost I would have done it months ago. Plus, it’s free.
The OP seemed to be coming at this from more of a “How do I get rid of the evidence?” angle. Regardless, a few stray files here and there are not what causes performance degradation, it’s junk in the registry, and there are freely available tools to cure even that.
I have been using [http://www.iolo.com/sm/](System Mechanic) for a while now. It seems to work pretty well. It cleans out your registry (always back it up first, duh!), invalid links, unused files, internet history, duplicate files, cross linked files, invalid uninstaller files and also has quick fixes for internet tweaking and security, among other things.
I also agree with Revtim about wiping the drive and reinstalling every so often. That has, by far, shown the most improvement in performance. “Windows Rot” sets in after about 6 months of heavy computer use for me. Even better is to reformat, reinstall and update (Windows Update, etc) everything and then make an image of your drive so you can ghost it later, once performance starts dropping. This keeps you from having to reinstall everything. I haven’t done this yet, but this is what they do to all the computers at my school lab every day. The re-ghosting procedure takes less than an hour. I plan on trying this soon.