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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.
Your hdd is filling up? Buy another one :) In my opinion spring cleaning is forced by hard drive failure, just make sure you've backed up any original data (savegames, work, probably 600 mb worth :)).
a new install every six months is the best way to make sure every thing keeps running well
The need for a "spring cleaning," IMO, is analogous to letting your sink pile up with dirty dishes. The messier things get, the more daunting (and unlikely to be completed) the cleaning task becomes. After years of gradually creating messes on my hard drive, I finally learned, through effort and discipline, to put my time and energy into "up-front cleaning." That is, I try to bring closure to everything I do before it fades into HD oblivion.
If I decide an app sucks, I eliminate it on the spot. I put everything related to a project into a single folder whenever possible and when the job is over, I take the time to archive it out to DVD or whatever. I delete all the "test files" ASAP (how many "finalfinal02_B.*'s do you have stashed away?). Delete all those old pr0n files regularly! Dump those log files!
It takes tremendous discipline to avoid it, but I've found all too often, that "spring cleanings" actually tend to be needed on an emergency basis when a new paying project needs space or when performance slows to a crawl.
Similarly, how many bachelor geeks have spent two hours doing dishes on an emergency basis before an important client or, god forbid, a member of the opposite sex is due to arrive.
"...all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness..." yada yada
A full reinstall risks loss of data. One example is your email. Outlook express buries its data somewhere in c:\windows\application data\ . Most people don't back up the windows directory and risk losing their email when performing a complete reinstall. Windows 2000, and XP are stable enough that rebuilding the system every 6 months is no longer a best practice. The only good time to reinstall the OS is if there is something wrong with it. For example if you have downloaded some strange porn-viewer.exe that has fsked everything up a reinstall should be your last resort option.
And the author's techniques do not apply to Macs or Linux. Obviously the author is merely a journalist, and not a computer expert.
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
As Linux From Scratch is rather hard to maintain anyway (rebuilding a library at the bottom often causes problems for stuff linked against it), it is common to "reLFS", that is build an entirely new LFS on another partition on your harddrive. One builds the very latest of everything, and then moves all config files and stuff over from the old system. When I move over my personal stuff, I tend to be veeeery strict with myself, and "leave behind" a lot of things (to die under the hand of mke2fs). That way, my system gets a total spring cleaning rather often, and the system is updated.
This is something that serious ergs me as so many people believe it. The amount of available free space does not affect system performance or stability in anyway shape or form. Your system will run just as well with 10MB of free space verses 10GB of free space(*). The only time you should ever be affected is when trying to write more data than you have. Even writes are not faster with more disk space except in usual circumstances since writes are buffered by the operating system.
(*) These numbers are true on Unix but less true on Windows. Depending on your type of file system, you should have either 2*RAM free or 2*RAM rounded up to the nearest power of two available (for fat or ntfs respectively). For some stupid reason, swap space is stored in a regular file system by Windows (instead of in it's own partition on Unix) so it is possible to run out of memory more frequently if you have less disk space available in Windows (although keep in mind that running out of memory is not that same as slow performance).
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That wont do it I had 4 gigs of stuff and it seems 300 megs were left, after many attempts at cleaning it properly The only way I could get rid of all the files was by mounting the windows partition under linux and removing all the files from there...
/s "temporary internet files" in your profile or local settings folder.
Just log in as a different user or as the administrator. If you are using a Win98 system then drop to a command prompt at boot and remove the folders. Why in the hell would you ever need to mount the volume under Linux to Remove the folders? Having trouble figuring how people could arrive at this.
If you are using WinNT,2K,XP, just log in as a different user and rmdir
BTW, Reinstalling an OS every year is just about the stupid thing I have heard in years.
The last time I did a 'clean' install was after the completion of a beta where it WAS necessary to remove the beta files for sure. And even this didn't entail wiping the hard drive, just doing a clean install of the OS.
Apparently some people think that their computer is still running Windows 3.1. Geesh
Basically cleaning out the startup items or removing crap software is all that anyone should have to do whether their OS is Win95,WinXP/NT or Linux.
Even on my main testing system, I have NEVER reinstalled the OS, and I do tons of beta testing on it with some really crappy software sometimes (Corel Betas are my favorite for crap installs). But reinstall the OS, I don't think so.
This article is more than ridiculous. Especially considering the market that it is directed at - basic users. They will lose their settings, and tons of files the have forgotten to back up.
Silly Silly...