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Spring Cleaning For Your Hard Drive
Shutup Now writes "Spring cleaning for your hardrive. This article talks about some extremes for keeping your computer running well. You decide whether this stuff is necessary." More than once a year is a good idea, too.
The windows registry is one cause of this.. it's a huge unmanagable beast, with many ways to have things load and hook in to various operations.
On the other hand, using it as a business system or for a specialized task where you aren't constantly changing configurations, then you probably have more chance of a long-term install working properly. But I wold imagine most /.ers would fit in the former, here. I sure do.
Speak before you think
deborphan will show which library packages are installed but not referenced by any apt-managed package. If you're reasonably sure you aren't building any unmanaged packages, you can just "dpkg -r `deborphan`" a couple times to remove any spurious libraries.
cruft will show all files not recognized by Debian. Capture to a file and filter it through a chain of a few grep -v statements for areas you know you want left alone. You'll get a list of files you can toss in pretty short order.
Well, seeing as how this article is targeted at the average user, doing a clean install should be left out. As someone else has mentioned, a clean install has no place in any kind of regular computer maintenance schedule for the average user. Now for the rest of us, we won't be reading the newspaper to figure out the best ways to do maintenance.
As you mention, separation of OS and data using partitions gives you quite a bit of flexibility when doing repairs (OS mysteriously implodes, scanner software kills machine, etc). But, there is an important difference between repairs and maintenance. Maintenance means you are cleaning/tuning a functioning computer, perhaps backing up files, removing stale desktop shortcuts, reorganizing files, etc. This means that your computer is NOT crashing and slow.. like the article says. Repairs are when something bad is happening, maybe your computer's performance is slow or the machine blue screens twice a day.. then you need to restore the machine's state to one in which it was functioning properly.. possibly using a clean install.
I think they have good ideas for general system maintenance, cleaning the desktop, programs listing, and re-arranging data into one root data folder (after a full data backup). But, they seem to mix two different problems into one story, and giving some irresponsible advice in the process. The article implies that it will be some kind of "spring cleaning" for your computer, to the average reader this means that computer at home they use to check email and surf the web with. Then they go onto mention that the reader should consider a clean install as part of their "spring cleaning" (yes, I know there is a warning, but why even mention it?).
Through my own experience as a user and computer tech, it is my conclusion that Windows NT-based systems do not need to be rebuilt annually like 9x used to under average use. People who simply use their computers as a means to an end (who are actually a good target for the article), do not install a lot of third-party software. They simply sit in front of their pre-configured machines at home and use the thing. The other types of users are the ones that usually end up doing clean installs of their operating system, those are the ones that like to tinker with their systems. If you know enough to be dangerous, you will be doing this on a regular basis. If you know what kind of software poses a risk to your computer, then you will be able to tinker with your computer for many years without the need for a re-install, providing you are using a modern operating system.
I have a ghost image of my OS with all of the applications I like setup installed and my system configured the way I like it (made after a clean install and all apps reinstalled). I have two partitions, one for data, games, etc., and th other for my OS. Ghost file is stored on the data drive. When things get cluttered, I simply restore the ghost image. I get my system back to "like new" state, the way I like it, and the whole process takes at most 7 mins.
Okay poeple what about hidden IE5 content files?
On a typical win2kpro install they can take up 8 gigs of a 26 gig hd over 2 years of use..
to delete tranverse your douemnt and settings folder to your users folder..
look for local settings folder and enter it..
the temporay internet files folder then needs opened..
warning Content.IE5 folder is hidden in here..add the folder to your path url and hit enter
do not delete foledrs you see..
enter in each folder and do selct all and move to recycle bin
repeat until all those pesky folders in Content.IE5 are empty..
open recycle bin and do select all
right click on itmes and selct delte..
choose ok on confirm screen..
Now your done finally!
Don't Tread on OpenSource