Among the simplest and most affordable steps you can take to prolong the life of your computer is to reduce unneeded programs, folders, and documents. A disk drive that’s clogged with unneeded and untouched documents is a disk drive that actually works harder than it has to. Even though Window’s defrag program can ease some of the strain that these kind of files place onto the drive, it does not do a lot to eliminate the difficulty to begin with. This is because the defrag program merely organizes the files in a system that can make it simpler for the computer to gain access to. (Thus minimizing the work needed to find and load them). But this process merely “lowers” the signs and symptoms that these documents cause – it doesn’t attack the cause. These files have to be deleted – not “organized!”
You already have this type of program on your pc and it is Windows’ Add/Remove Programs (available from the Control Panel). This software will assist you with getting rid of applications that you not only no longer desire, but additional files that these programs use as well (dynamic link libraries, database files, registry references, shortcut icons, etc.).
But at times Windows’ Add/Remove Programs isn’t really enough. Even though this software program really does a fairly good job of eliminating unwanted applications, it can leave a few files behind even with a complete uninstall – files which in turn grow to be orphan files. And it’s really these orphan files which could genuinely mess up a hard drive and limit the life of an otherwise, youthful and powerful PC.
Orphans usually are files that have short-term data created by a program, documents manufactured by the user, partial files remaining from a pc crash, or any other kind of miscellaneous files made for almost any other purpose. The thing is that an uninstall software will not delete the orphan files it leaves behind since they were by no means part of the system when it was first installed. An uninstall program can remove only the files it inserted onto a hard drive during its install regimen.
Consequently while Windows’ Add/Remove Programs can easily remove an entire program, you may need to get rid of those pesky little things with a much more advance file cleaner like CleanSweep for example. CleanSweep is a distinctive system that will especially seek out files that are no longer linked with a system, after which inquire if you wish to delete them.
The only time that you wouldn’t wish to remove an orphan file is if the file were an actual document that you created just before deleting a program. If you decide to say, uninstall Microsoft Word, all of the documents that you created with Word would then turn into orphan files. As well as if you decide to remove a graphics-editing program, all the images you’ve made with the software would certainly become orphan files.
The wise thing to do whenever you don’t wish to get rid of the data that you created with an unwanted program is to:
1. Save or convert your documents to a structure that could work with different program first (that may be, a program that you intend to retain)
2. Store these on to a floppy disk, thumb drive, or CD-ROM
3. Move forward with a program like CleanSweep.
Using CleanSweep or other equivalent sort of utility can erase between less than a megabyte of hard disk drive room to over five megabytes or more. That might seem like handful of “clog material” to you personally, nevertheless to your pc, it’s much less to process!
