I need to clean up my hard drive–my computer’s gone beyond sluggish right into annoyingly S-L-O-W. I know I need something that will overwrite all my deleted stuff as well as get rid of temporary crap.
I’ve used CrapCleaner, but even though it gets rid of some stuff, I haven’t really noticed any improvement. I’ve also used RegCure and AdAware.
I’ve downloaded WinClear on trial, but it won’t actually CLEAN anything until I buy it–guess the trial was only for the hard drive analysis. Makes me wonder if it’s a scam product. I can’t afford to purchase anything wastefully. I need something that will really work.
If anyone knows a good program, I’d sure appreciate hearing about it! Thanks!
How much of your drive is full, hard drives that are nearly full slow way down and get highly fragmented as well, especially if you deal with alot of larger files like music and video.
Try a defrag as well.
Next, how much ram do you have, many recent updates to windows, antivirus and anti spyware software have made windows a little chubbier lately.
Many windows machines are getting a little sluggish with only 256mb of ram. another 256 can be had for less than $20 and may make a huge difference in percieved speed.
Actually, a full wipe and/or format and reinstall is usually far more efficient than trying to fix mysterous little problems.
Around here, anything that can’t be sorted out in less than an hour gets rebuilt from the ground up.
ETA:
If you have anything less than 1GB, run, do not walk, and upgrade that RAM! XP with less than 1GB is painful, and Vista with less than 2GB is only for the masochistic.
Nuke and rebuild works because it is often a registry issue, and it is good to start from a clean registry. When I have had the same issue, in addition to a nuke and rebuild, I also do a complete hard drive wipe. The true “nuke 'em from orbit”.
I would start with a good Registry cleaner. One has to be carefull with these things, but “PCWorld” magazine recommended eMetrix’s Eusing Free Registry Cleaner. It is free, and works extremely well, getting rid of most of the crap in the Registry. I’ve used others, but was impressed with this program.
You obviously should do a full backup before using it, then go to Help and System Restore and create a Restore Point (although the program will do this for you if you want).
As long as you’ve used the antispyware and antivirus programs often, this should speed up things considerably.
I know this all too well, however what is most convenient for me in the shop can easily result in days of headache to the end user/customer. IME as a pc shop owner, many people would trade an extra hour or two of labor to not have to go through the process of reloading everything from scratch.
Soap and water, with a good spongy scouring pad. It’ll be clean, but may not actually work anymore.
I’ve taken to keeping my important data on an external hard drive, so that if I need a tidy up, I reinstall just the OS and software (which doesn’t take too long, though there’s sometimes a few days of tweaking to get things back the way I like them).
If the external drive is the one that becomes problematic, I can copy that stuff to a second drive before it dies. Hopefully. No guarantees in this biz, though.
If you’re going to that extreme and plan to do it anything like often, save yourself a little bit of trouble later by using something like System Rescue CD to create an image after step 3 so you can in the future restore the image instead of reinstalling individual software packages.
By the way, whatever you do to clean things up, I’d bet you have been browsing with Internet Explorer. Try switching to Firefox and you won’t have half as much bad stuff getting in. I don’t even run anti-virus. And don’t download stuff like toolbars and cursors either, bad stuff comes along for the ride.
Don’t use registry cleaners. And there’s no need to reformat prior to a reinstall: you should boot to a command prompt from the XP CD, create a directory called Windows.old, and move the c:\windows, c:\program files, and c:\documents and settings directories and the file c:\boot.ini to that directory. This way you can easily recover.
It’s not really extreme when the OP’s request is taken at face value. Of course, if one is pressed for time, the other intermediate steps are quite appropriate. I like yours, though. I just don’t use Linux. I guess I just like to rebuild from scratch.
