Six Ways to Clean Up Your Computer

Kiplinger's Personal Finance Magazine, Dec, 1998 by Kathy Yakal

Is your PC sluggish and listless? Here's how to perk it up.

Now that mega-megahertz processors and Godzilla-size hard drives are so prevalent, you might think it's okay to ignore some of the routine tasks designed to speed up, clean up and debug your PC. But even the newest, fastest computers perform better and faster if you do a little light housekeeping, and older PCs will perform almost as good as new.

So if your PC seems sluggish and listless, these six steps should perk it up.

1. USE YOUR BUILT-IN TOOLS. The Windows operating system has its own built-in utility programs designed to improve performance. ScanDisk checks your drives for problems with the way your files are indexed and offers to fix them automatically, improving speed and performance. And because files often get fragmented, causing performance problems, Disk Defragmenter moves all the data for every file to the same place on the hard drive. You can find these tools by elk king the Start menu, then Programs/Accessories/System Tools. (If you have an old system with very limited hard-drive space, another System Tool--the Compression Agent--may open up more space, but it will also slow down your system.)

Windows 98 lets you run those tools automatically with Task Scheduler (also in System Tools), but the new Maintenance Wizard tackles more potential system problems. Click on the Wizard in System Tools and follow the prompts to schedule ScanDisk and Defrag and to clear check marks next to applications that you don't want to run automatically: (These applications also show up as icons in your Windows taskbar tray, in the lower right corner of your screen.)

2. INSTALL A VIRUS SCANNER. If you often download noncommercial or otherwise suspect software, it pays to be conscientious about scanning for viruses. Consider adding McAfee VirusScan (www.mcafee.com, $39.95) or Norton AntiVirus (www.symantec.com, $49.95). And remember to check for scanning-program updates on the Internet so you keep up with new viruses as they're detected.

3. DELETE FILES YOU'LL NEVER USE AGAIN. If you're getting close to maxing out your hard-drive space, deleting files you don't need can dramatically increase speed.

Introduce yourself to Windows Explorer. You'll find it in both Windows 95 and Windows 98 by right-clicking on the My Computer shortcut and clicking Explore. Your system's drives and folders are listed in the left pane. Click on a folder to see its files in the right pane.

You can take a couple of approaches to locating and deleting obsolete files: If you want to weed out the graphics files or text documents you've saved on your system, click on Tools/Find/Files or Folders. Type "*." and the extension for the file type, such as "*.pcx" for certain graphics files or "*.doc" for Word files. Then click Find Now. From the resulting list, highlight the trees you want to erase, and click File/Delete, or hit the Delete key.

TIP: To highlight several consecutive files in a list, click on the first one, and then hold down the shift key, move your cursor to the last file to be deleted and click. To highlight several that are not consecutive, click on the first, then control/click on the the rest.

Warning: Your applications--and Windows itself--use files with numerous extensions. Be sure that you know what files you're deleting. You can go through your folders one by one and scan the files, deleting selectively. To see the size and date of each file, click View/Details.

Files you'll want to delete include temporary files (anything with a "*.tmp" extension) that applications and Internet activity dump onto your system, as well as any files and folders in your Recycle Bin that you have not yet deleted.

TIP: Sending data to the Recycle Bin does not banish it from your system. You must eventually right-click on the Bin shortcut and click Empty Recycle Bin. To delete files permanently instead of zapping them to the, Bin, right-click on the Recycle Bin, select Properties and check the box next to Do Not Move Files to the Recycle Bin.

4. REMOVE APPLICATIONS COMPLETELY. If software applications kept to themselves on your PC, uninstalling them wouldn't be such a problem. But they don't. Lots of them send tendrils snaking throughout your system. Leaving them there when you delete an application won't necessarily do any harm, but it might.

For example, after you delete a program, the next time you boot up, you might get a message that says Windows can't find files--especially files such as "wini.ini" and "system.ini"--because the system is still looking for a pointer for an application that's no longer there. Solution: Always try to delete programs with the Add/Remove Programs utility. Most programs that are less than about two years old can be removed this way.

Double-click on the My Computer shortcut, then on the Control Panel icon. Open Add/Remove Programs and highlight the program you want to toss. Click Add/Remove and follow the dialog-box instructions. Warning: Sometimes, as a program is uninstalling, Windows finds a file that the program shares with another application and asks if you want to delete it. To be safe, keep those files.