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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.
spring cleaning the right way- time for a clean install! It was time for a new porn archive anyway...
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when i moo u moo - just like that
... The power supply fan halts on the 6 oz. of dust blocking the blades.
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 :)).
I don't take tech tips from the newspaper.
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
Now appearing on Slashdot! Coming soon, how to set the time on your VCR!
eMule is my backup.
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.
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
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.
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.
...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.
Russian drives are "purged."
they post their stuff on a public ftp server and let the rest of the world make copies."
(A quote from your hero and mine, Linus Torvalds.)
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.
All I really need for my spring cleaning is some Windex and an extra strong magnet. That should clean out my hard drive pretty quickly, no?
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http://nemilar.net - Not your grandmother's soup kitchen
"Ah yes, the picking of the nose - a long practiced art started by arabs for digging sand out of their nasal cavities after those long caravans. The main trick to picking the nose is one simple rule: if it bleeds, you are picking it too much... or not enough."
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 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...