Any good freeware to clean up junk on the hardrive?

Vanity | 1-28-2009 | Frantzie

[Frantzie]

Does anyone have any suggestions for freeware to clean up harddrives especially getting rid of jpgs from an employee surfing too much.

[billorites]

Do a disk cleanup from "My Computer"

Then use CCleaner to delete unwanted cookies, temp files, temp internet cache etc. Don't use it to do Registry cleaning. That's possibly troublesome.

Then go back to "My Computer" and let the Windows wizard tell you whether you need to defrag. You likely do. That can speed things up for you.

[1rudeboy]

Who’d want to delete those? I’m talking about the ones of the wife, kids, dog, etc.

[randomhero97]

Yeah, just do a search for .jpg or jpeg and then delete them. It’s easier to write a script, just double-click and it does the job for you.

[taxcontrol]

TweakNow or Eusing reg cleaners .... both are good but not top of the line. Of course, top of the line costs money.

[al baby]

oh silly me

[mysterio]

I run CCleaner.

[billorites]

I’m afraid of those automated registry cleaners. They can cause more problems than they solve. Bloated registry entries probably are less of a problem than missing stuff that was incorrectly deleted. Backup in advance if you must use a registry cleaner and make sure that you have practiced restoring registry entries. I’m always more afraid of that than I am of a clean OS install.

[mysterio]

I don’t think CCleaner removes .jpegs that have been saved to the hardrive, does it?

If they're in a cache or temporary folder.

[Faith65]

bookmark

[Frantzie]

Thanks. Yes I am a little paranoid of registry cleaners.

[aMorePerfectUnion]

http://www.stevengould.org/index.php?Itemid=69&id=15&option=com_content&task=view

Cleanup!

[Old Sarge]

C:\> delete c:\*.*

Works every time!

[CaribouCrossing]

Thanks for the tip.

[mkjessup]

Or the old standby C:\> rmdir/s/q *.*

Say "GOODbye clutter, HELLO nice clean (empty) hard drive! LOL

[mcshot]

bookmark too

[diefree]

You could try picasa, goodle’s picture gatherer and then when you find them all delete them.

I have stuff from 3 computers stored on an outside hard drive and last night I did a search for all my jpg’s because I didn’t know where some photos were. The search came up with 10,000. A lot were dupes but there were a lot of icon jpg’s

[Frantzie]

Huh? I just tried it and my hard drive appears to be empty?? WTF?

LOL! Smart alec.

I have Spy Sweeper on there but the subscript expired. It was just running in RAM and sucking up all the RAM. The hard drive was not spinning so I never caught it. I looked at the processes in task manager. Weird. Still doing cleaning.

Thanks for all the tips except you Old Sarge and the ShamWow guy. ;-)

[dayglored]

Do a full image copy (e.g. Acronis) and RE-INSTALL WINDOWS FROM SCRATCH.

There is nothing faster or easier. When you add the time you've spent already, to the time you will spend fooling around with half-solutions, starting over is a better bet in 99% of cases.

Important: Do a FULL DISK IMAGE copy first, so that you can selectively restore any files you actually wanted, later. And of course verify the backup before you re-install.

But don't waste your time trying to scrape the mud off a pig just so you can smear lipstick on it. The Windows installation on the drive is crap. Start over.

I say that as someone who has done many hundreds of installations of Windows in the past 10 years, both personal and professional, and who now runs the IT department at my company.

Of course, you might be in the 1% where there's something SO PRECIOUS in the existing installation that you can't copy it off somewhere, and can never reproduce it. But I doubt it.

[Frantzie]

Is there anything you UNcheck when you run the cleaner? Thanks.

[engrpat]

CCleaner.com

Absolutely agree. I got my copy from cnet.com. It is a great little program.