Quick System Spring Clean and Optimisation

PCs are a bit like cupboards, when they're new there is little in them and it takes no time to find things. As they fill up it becomes more time consuming until the day arrives that spring cleaning is the only way to sort matters. All the rubbish needs to go in the bin, and the remaining things need to be tidied into some semblance of order.

With the cupboard you need a bin bag and a few spare minutes. With you PC, the Recycle bin, some software and a few spare minutes.

Most of the software listed is free or shareware and does not require the brains of a rocket scientist to operate, so no need to panic. The aim of this guide is to tell you what is possible and point you in the direction of the approriate information. It is not a hand holding exercise, half the fun of computing is learning, so here is some fun for you.

First things first, throw out the rubbish.

Bin Bag

• For safeties sake, make a Restore point before commencing. This enables you to go back to the beginning if it all goes Pete Tong. Programs/Accessories/System Tools/System Restore. Follow the no-brainer prompts.
• The first and most obvious thing to do is remove all the crud that has gathered over time on you HD. WinXP & ME have build in tools for this, so run Programs/Accessories/Disk Cleanup which does exactly what the name implies.
• Uninstall any programmes you no-longer use. Control Panel/Add or Remove Programs.
• Microsoft produced an excellent tool to tidy up you Registry with gathers plenty of clutter over time. Download Regclean install & run. Your Registry is tidied up, a file is written to the Regclean Directory allowing you put back all the remove stuff should something go wrong. One word of caution, if you use Microsoft Office XP (Setup) or
  Microsoft Office 2000 (Setup) Regclean can cause problems (non-here I might add) as detailed in Microsoft Knowledge Base Article - 299958. If you are worried Shareware alternatives include Registry First Aid, Easy Cleaner or RegVac.

A quick reboot should confirm the value of dumping dead files and hopefully show some improved speed.

Optimisation

Windows includes the tools to tidy itself up, some of which take a considerable amount of time to run, defragging a large Hard Drive partition for instance. If you don't fancy sitting in front of your PC watching paint dry then simply use the Programs/Accessories/System Tools/Schedule Task tool to fun them overnight. You simply select the tool, the time and leave your PC switched on during the night. I recommend the following order:

• Disk Defragmenter - Allow 1 hour per 20 Gig of disk space to complete before scheduling next task. i.e. If you have a 40 Gig HD split into two partions of 10 & 30 MB respectively then start defragging C: (10Gig) at midnight then D: (30Gig) at 12:30. You machine will be free to task again at 2AM.
• Virus Scanner - Allow 1 hour for 40 Gig to be scanned.

Check your PC is running at the correct Front Side Bus (FSB) rate, has the appropriate memory to match (no point using PC 100 RAM on a PC capable of using PC 133 for instance). This information is available when you boot. Simply press Del or F1 or whatever key your machine displays on booting to allow you access to the Bios.

If you know your chip type, then you can look them up at the AMD or Intel site as appropriate. If you want to learn more than you need to know about Bios' then pop over to Rojaks Pot for a definitive guide.

A very simple way of finding out what is installed, how fast is it going etc is to download WCPUID. A genuine no-brain option. Compare this information to that given by your CPU manufacturer to ensure your machine is running at the correct speed.