Have you cleaned your hard drive lately?

computers, Office Life, random thoughts 2 Minutes

So first off, you guys should know that I’m not a computer tech, or the geekiest person alive, BUT, I was clued in to a really good tool that cleans up your hard drive far better than the Disk Cleanup tool supplied with Windows. One of the tech guys here at my office, whose job it is to take care of people’s computers told me about this and downloaded it to my work computer (and with all the firewalls and other stuff we have loaded on our computer and as draconian as they are about blocking anything potentially harmful, I am perfectly confident in recommending this to you).

It’s a free – yes, FREE – utility you can download from CNET.com, called CCleaner.  You can read the info and ratings on CNET, and if they’re offering it, it’s safe.

From the first screen (pictured below), just click on “Run Cleaner” at the bottom right and it will do its thing. As a comparison, generally when I run the Windows utility, it finds a couple megabytes of crap (on a good day), but most of the time it only finds a few kilobytes. When I run CCleaner, it gets as much as 83 megabytes of old cached temporary files, cookies, internet garbage and so on.

I don’t do much with the other screens (Registry, Tools, Options), but you’ll find tools to install/uninstall programs, choose what loads at Startup and more.

There is a similarly better defragmenting utility than Windows comes with, Smart Defrag, which can also be found at CNET.

Defragmenting your hard drive compacts files that have become scattered as the computer searches for open space to store the bits and bytes of everything you do all day. Seriously, it’s a mess. Defragging, as it’s commonly called, can take awhile, especially if you’ve never done it and your computer is getting a little long in the tooth, but it can really improve performance and speed it up.

I love these two utilities, I even installed them on my home computer. They’re both really easy to use, no matter how little tech inclination you may have. Even if you’d rather have someone turn your computer on and off for you, YOU CAN DO THIS. Hope these help.

Published by D. D. Syrdal

Writer of vampire stories and science fiction. First novel, "Revenants Abroad", available now at Amazon. If you like a vampire you can go out drinking with and still respect yourself in the morning, I think you'd like Andrej.

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9 thoughts on “Have you cleaned your hard drive lately?”

  1. DD you know I love this post. I am still having prob with my laptop. Just a few days ago it gave me a black screen again and did not want to open window. Also I have tons of virus for what ever reasons. I am pretty consistance and I still get virus. I think it is from certain search pages. I have install the cleaner and about to run it to see if it helps some. Oh yeah I fix the problem with my notification. The email notification was off from the subscription page for god know what reason. I am just a happy camper that is back to normal. No more constantly stalking for me:)

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  2. Oh I hope this helps with your system performance. And I’m so glad you got the subscriptions problems fixed! 🙂 I don’t know if the CCleaner will detect or remove viruses, though. You can check at CNET.com for virus removal tools, though. There are better programs than McAfee or Norton, I know that much.

    Be careful on pages that have lots of pop-ups, those can be really dicey.

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  3. Thanx, DD! I’m gonna clean up and back everything up onto my external hard drive (my recent favoirte possession) this week.

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  4. You’re welcome. I was so delighted with the way this program worked, I just couldn’t believe how much more stuff it was able to find and delete than the lame Windows Disk Cleaner did. It freed up a lot of space on my hard drive. Then of course defragging makes it all run faster when the computer doesn’t have to go searching for bits of code.

    I don’t have an external hard drive, but between my USB drive and the computer each having copies of stuff I figure I’m relatively safe. Good for you for doing the backup!

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  6. Oh, you are probably going to be very surprised at how much junk has accumulated! 🙂 I ran it on my office computer today, and it hasn’t been that long since I did it, and it still cleared out over 134Mb of junk. I started the defrag before I left the office, so I’ll reboot it when I get in tomorrow morning. Hopefully it will speed it up a bit again.

    And more time to read is always top priority 😉

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