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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
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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
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 :)
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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...