Tuesday 15 November 2011

Keep It Clean!

First of all, a warm welcome to the new Blog. I hope you find this blog informative, and the information useful. I'll try and get some other techie people to send me some blog information or to upload a blog too, so that we can address a range of issues and also give you a wide range of tricks and tips.

I did set up a facebook page, but realised that it might be better to write the articles on a blog instead. It'll look nicer and give everybody a better interface. Hope you enjoy it!

We'll start off the first blog with something that will help so many of us computer users:-

Keeping it Clean!

My father is a great example here, he often downloads and purchases programs that are designed to "speed up your system" I am sure we've all seen adverts for super duper software that will promise to make your system quicker, by sitting quietly in the background and monitoring everything that is going on, tweaking your computer as you go. My father had 3 of these programs running on his system at one point, and you can imagine how slow his computer was because of it!

You see.. it's a little like putting some water in a glass, then sliding a ruler in to see how high the water is. As soon as you insert the ruler, it affects the height of the water.

Instead of using a running program to speed up your system, you can manually do a few things yourself.

The programs I'd particularly draw your attention to are both created by a company called Piriform. One is called CCleaner and the other is Defraggler. For this post, we'll just look at CCleaner. You can download this direct from www.ccleaner.com . It's completely FREE.

Installation is quite straight forward, you accept most defaults. When you run the program for the first time it will give you the options to analyse or clean the system. Down the left hand side you'll see a list of options that you can tick. May I suggest that you do NOT tick the "WIPE FREE SPACE" which is currently right at the bottom of that list. Everything else you could check.

Click Run Cleaner and you'll probably get a warning, saying that it will permanantly delete files from your system. This is correct, it will be removing temporary files from your system that are no longer needed, so click "OK"

When it's finished its run, you'll notice that it shows how much it's cleaned off your drive.  Yes, often it's quite a lot!  I run my CCleaner every morning at work. I just ran it at 1pm while writing this blog and it removed 157mb from my hard drive.  Files that have been written away to my hard drive that are not completely necessary any more.

The more options you choose from the list, the more it will clean.  But you can pick and chose the things that affect you the most.

It has a registry cleaner too, but I'll cover that in another article.

If you have any questions relating to this article, please post them below.  Please keep your comments clean as this is a family site.  Thank you!

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