Essential Utility Tips
Pete Cullen | Sep 21, 2009 | Comments 0
File this one under “posts I have been meaning to write for ages”, but in recent weeks I have been asked by a number of folks to speed up their flagging Windows installations (both XP and Vista).
Over time as applications get installed and removed, internet caches get filled up and PCs slowly grind to a near halt. Especially Windows XP, after several years of use it is not uncommon to find multiple gigabytes of junk lurking around. While there is no greater medicine for a grumbling machine that a full wipe and reinstall of Windows (or in cases of particularly aged hardware, a new machine) these two utilities could help you out of a jam. Oh and they are also 100% free of charge.
CCleaner
Originally called Crap Cleaner but shortened as to not offend any delicate sensibilities, CCleaner is one of the most essential tools I use on a daily basis. Quite simply it clears out the crap from your machine and (hopefully) speeds it up.
It cleans Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari and a whole host of Windows features like temporary files, logs, etc. The Registry cleaner is perhaps my favourite feature, and it also gets shot of a whole pile of junk from third party applications like Acrobat, WinZip, etc.
On one particular clients machine this tool gets rid of over 500mb of internet temporary files alone each month (but they are web designers!). My record is 3.5Gb on a home machine, so it is well worth running on everything you have. Special note, it is also profile specific so if you have a user who has a honking great profile you will need to be logged in as them to get the full benefits.
Defraggler
Defraggler is also from Piriform who make CCleaner and Recuva (a file recovery utility) and is a small, lightweight and very powerful disk defragmentation tool. The built in Windows defrag tool is alright, but this is the closest I have found to the very old school Speedisk from the old days of the Norton Utilities suite. Once again a defragmented disk will keep things behaving as they should.
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