Photo credit goes to mukluk

In the previous part I’ve been talking about the reasons why computer slow down and tuning therefore the startup programs. In this lesson we’re going to clean the drawers (also known as hard-drives) of our desk (computer) and to file them properly (defragmentation) to make the PC working more efficiently.

Get Your Gloves On – It’s Time To Clean Up

So, are you ready to clean up your pc now? Good. We could do this manually for sure, but in fact this would take years, because many of the junk there on your pc is hidden in folder structures that go beyond 6 or 7 levels.

But fortunately there are some programs, that will do the job as well. I’ll focus here especially on the freeware CCleaner, which does his work at cleaning all the junk pretty well.

Installing CCleaner

If you didn’t have done it already go to the website and download the tool and start the setup.

Click Next and decide whethe you agree with the conditions or not.

When you hit the installing options, be aware if you do want to add CCleaner also to your recycle bin or have another toolbar you don’t need installed. So if your life doesn’t depend on that new toolbar I would recomment to not installing it. (We are here to clean up and not install more programs or toolbars we don’t need.)

After the installation is done, hit Finish to run CCleaner.

You are greeted by a simple interface with plenty of options where to locate the junk.

For beginnning, default settings do a pretty good job, but you may like to have a look at the specific browsers you use. Uncheck Cookies if you want to keep logged in at your favorite website and/or uncheck Internet History, if you want to keep the history of your internet activities (especially handy for me as I don’t use often bookmarks).

When you are satisfied with the settings, hit Analyze.

Now you see the approximate size of all the files that will be removed. For my first use this is a pretty good result, isn’t it? And I’m only using my operating system since a fresh install for a barely one month, so you may expect even higher results.

If you are happy with the analysis, hit Run Cleaner and wait for the magic to be done.

My PC is 710 MB lighter! If all diets would be so promising…

Now we want to free the Registry of junk and orphaned entries. So navigate to Registry in the left menu as show in the screenshot above.

In this view now first hit Scan for Issues and then after seeing all the unnecessary registry entries click on Fix selected issues… and you’ll be prompted if you want to backup those changes to the registry, which I strongly recommend! Only in case something doesn’t work anymore. So hit Yes and choose a location for backing up the changes.

Wait a moment and let the magic happen and woosh! Your registry has been cleaned up. If something does not work anymore or you feel sorry for all those registry entries you killed, you simply double click at the freshly created backup.reg file and all will be undone.