Cleaning Your PC

You probably use your laptop or desktop every single day. Have you noticed any slow down or poor performance? How often do you clean out old programs? How often do you clean up your registry?

You might not even care about the cleanliness of your pc, but just by clearing up some temp files and cleaning your registry, you can drastically increase the overall performance of your computer. Lucky for you there is an awesome program that covers just this problem, and the best part is it's free. CCleaner or what it use to go by Crap Cleaner, is a utility which will optimize windows performance based on routine maintenance. It has 4 areas of clean up to choose from. The first is the Cleaner, which selects windows files and application files such as temporary internet files, cookies, recycle bin, and so on. If you click the Analyze button it will search through and give a list of items to be removed along with a size. If it's your first time, I've seen upwards of 1-2 gigs of crap that was just taking up space. Hit Run Cleaner to delete the files and see how it magically increases your pc's performance.

The next tool in it's arsenal is the Registry Cleaner. This will search your windows registry for any unused file extensions, any left over files from removed programs, missing .dll files, and tons more. ALWAYS and I mean ALWAYS backup your registry before you clean it. When you hit clean CCleaner will always ask you to backup changes made to registry, just in case something happened to windows or it removed a needed component by accident. It saves it as dates, so you can keep track of when the problem occurred and restore your registry prior to that.

The last clean up is under the Tools area. This has two parts and both are pretty important. The first being the Uninstall section. This will list every program that is installed currently on your PC. You might want to remove programs that you no longer use and take up space on your hard drive. Bundled software that came with your PC might not even show up in your programs list. Select the program you want removed and hit the Uninstaller button. It will run either the programs own uninstall or windows add/remove program. Then the final utility is called Startup, which controls the programs that start when you load up windows. This is important because the amount of programs that start up when Windows does actually slows down the start up process. This is also handy if you a program gives errors when Windows start, you can disable the program that gives the error. Don't just guess the programs to be disabled, look for any obvious ones like google or adobe, you can say don't run at startup and still have those programs. They'll just be ran when needed, not upon startup.

So that's it for now, here's the link for the CCleaner. I'd run this maybe once a week, the first time always takes the longest, it shouldn't be as bad the second or third time you run it.