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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.
Sad but true. Everytime I have a new piece of windows software I ask is this the one thats going to irretrievably break my OS.
One step further: buy a new hard drive every spring. Their capacity doubles every year, so you don't even need to back anything up, just copy to the new hard drive and stash the old one somewhere.
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
For me it comes down to a balance...
A pile of CDs ($2), several hours of an IT professional's time (mine) spent backing stuff up (3x$30-50/hr), the pain in the ass when you managed to miss something vs. that shiny new hard drive ($80).
On a straight time and cost equation, it's reached the point where it's now cheaper to buy a new drive and have a complete backup whenever I want one (plus a fully booting system I know at least semi-worked whenever I break my main one). Six months, or however much, later, if I'm sure I don't need that backup version, instead of a bunch of full CDRs, I've got an extra drive for a toy Linux box.
Then again, the geek factor of getting to fiddle with the minutae kicks in. (Although the extra drives for toy Linux boxes appeal)
If I'm short of time, buying a new drive ultimately works out cheaper. If I've not met my geekiness quota recently, fiddling's more fun.
...More often than not, it's all those System Restore points that are using up gigabytes of space (unless you're uber and have that service disabled). Just about every time you update a driver, XP will make a restore point for you, even if you don't ask for one. Thankfully, you can make XP get rid of all but the most recent:
.DLLs and junk files" they sound like someone extolling the virtue of the Intel chip because it's more "compatible and stable" than an AMD chip. I.e., locked into stale notions of a computer's capabilities. I would recommend Norton's system cleaning utilites before I recommend a full wipe.
Go to My Computer, right-click on your XP drive/partition, click Properties, click the Disk Cleanup button to the bottom right of the pie chart, click the More Options tab, click the bottom "Clean up" button and click OK. I do that about once a week and free up at least 100MB each time.
The disk cleanup applet will take care of the majority of system cruft. I don't know why people wipe and reinstall so often, it's really not necessary. When people talk to me about "random
Mostly, the gradual system slowdown people experience as they add programs over time is due to excess baggage like startup programs and unneccesary services. Check your system tray, hit CTRL+ALT+DEL and check your services list. You don't need WinAmp Agent, Mozilla QuickStart, or anything that automatically starts up anyway when you click on a multimedia file.
And check out This excellent page for getting rid of half of the services you never use anyway.
And use BootVis. It will clean up your boot time. Maybe a lot.
If you know what you're doing (as in, not the type of thing that should be posted in an article for novices, although he did include a warning) doing a clean install can have a *much* greater performance advantage in windows--including windows xp. Heck, from what I observed with my computer, I'd do it every 3 months...although every 6 months is good enough for most heavy users and every year should be good enough for the rest of the population.
The trick is knowing what you want to backup, and making absolutely sure that you have it in places that you'd normally back up anyway. If possible, keep all data files in a separate partition so you can just format the one where windows and the installed programs are. I'd never back up the windows directory (that's where most of the trash that I want to get rid of is), but I changed the outlook directory to "E:\My Documents\mail" (yes, I changed the my documents directory to the "data" partition as well). If you don't have a separate partition, keep a checklist of every directory that you need to backup, and save everything that you would want to backup to those directories.
The only good time to reinstall the OS is if there is something wrong with it.
Not really, sometimes there's something wrong with your system and the best way to truly fix it is by doing the clean install thing. Try running adaware and see how much spyware is installed. Then there are viruses...I've never had problems with them, but a friend of mine recently ran a scan and found 9 viruses in his computer, and his only detectable symptom was the computer would lock up often.
Basically, what I'm trying to say with all this is that, if you're careful, you can safely do clean installs without risking the loss of any data at all, and the benefits are much greater than "reorganizing and defragging". And to those who will undoubtly respond...yes, I know, I've never had the need to do frequent clean installs with my linux partition either.
One final advice for all you novices who are going to take the risk and do this for the first time. Don't follow these instructions:
Then you turn your computer off, put the operating system CD into the drive and turn the computer back on.For god's sake...don't force your cdrom open when the computer is off. Just turn it on and plop the cd in there first thing, while in the bios screen :)
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
Ah, sexism at its best. Believe it or not, a number of my lady friends(ie, bachelorettes), have -exactly- the same problem. Folks, it ain't just guys who procrastinate cleaning up- women are just better at the last minute frenzied pickup :-)
Please help metamoderate.
Now, how many of you clean your keyboard the hard way, i.e. with a q-tip, trying to go between all the keys?
:) ) So go on, and clean your keyboards under the sink.
Cmon, unscrew your keyboard's upper molding and wash your keyboard under water, no soap. This is what I do and it works well. I have done it last week with my two Logitech iTouch keyboards. They look like new. Yeah, so water spills over the electronics. So what? As long as the keyboard is not plugged while washing it, and that you let it dry properly on a hot dry day (I let them dry 24 hours to be sure), they will continue to work.
Do not forget, water + electronics is not the problem, its water + electricity (off course, leaving your electronics for months under water, well, it might rust... Don't over do it.
Remember the year 2000? They promised us flying cars. They delivered the PT Cruiser...
That has been my philosophy since about 1996, and it has served me well. Having a notebook also helps to making sure that important data is duplicated.
I buy a new HD about every 18 months, it usually gives me enough room to dump my (full) previous HD, and still have an equivalent amount of free space. It takes me about 18 months anyways to fill up what's left on the new hard drive.
My friend's trick is to buy small sized hard drives from a big retailer that gives the 'premium' warranty, which is usually good for 2-3 years. When the warranty is almost out, he backs up his data, takes the drive out of the case and drops it from waist height onto the floor. He brings it in, and thanks to Moore's law, gets a new drive that is usually about twice as big as what he originaly had, since HD manufacturers stop making the small sized drives with time.
I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.