Those of you who like to play around with their computers a lot will be familiar with the need to “format” or what is sometimes incorrectly named “reboot” their hard drive (also misunderstood at times to refer to the tower type box of the computer containing it’s components. It does not.)

The reason for this need to “format” and “reinstall” your Operating System is because with time and use the hard drive gets filled with “junk”. I call it junk, because to most it is just that. Install logs, error logs, system logs, backup files, backup logs, update files, installation files, temporary files, internet content and much, much more.

Now, these files do of course serve their purposes. But most of the time, the average person doesn’t require them, and infact, back to my post on privacy and security, these files can at times be compromising, because esentially they keep track of everything you have done via your computer (to an extent).

There are several ways to minimise and reduce this junk, and I will cover a few here. The most obvious ones, at least t o me right now are the following; Install less, clean regularly, automate where possible/simple.

Ok, so that’s all good and well, but what does it mean? Well, Installing less means exactly that, install less to your computer. Now it doesn’t necessarily mean don’t install all the software you want, but it does mean at least do less of it. Programs that claim they will boost your RAM or improve performance are a load of cobblers. How cam you make your notepad have more space by filling it with notes? You can’t. You have to add more pages, or erase what’s already there.

Prevention

The first thing I would suggest is some preventative action, if you really mut install a piece of software, don’t simply click through the process ignoring everything. Most pieces of software these days have a “Custom” install option, and usually it will give some simply options to select a minimal, or full install as well. Look into each and see if you really do need every little thing that the full install provides. If not, go for minimal, if you need an “item” or two that don’t come with the minimal install, use custom, and specify them yourself.

The installation above shows a program I installed recently called Ice Chat. Now this program is a relatively small program, but the same applies in one way or another to most programs you can install. The most obvious thing to remove is the “Extra Languages” feature. Usually English is the first language if it doesn’t allow individual selection and so you can just de-select it. Otherwise normally you can deselect all other languages but your own. Now in this case, the language files are going to save us only 0.2MB, not a lot for one program, but over a lot of programs it soon builds up. And the size is not the main cause, but I’ll go into that in a moment. I have seen programs have 100MB+ language files, and so it really is wasting a lot of space you will never need.

Languages aren’t the only additional feature though that can be removed from a program, this example only gives two major areas for space saving here but others can offer 10 or more. Don’t be afraid to remove some if you are unsure. If you find you need it later, 99% of programs will let you run the installer again and “modify” the installation to add things you previously left out. The other 1% can simply just be uninstalled and the process started again.

Now, I mentioned earlier that size isn’t the biggest problem, it’s the number of files. This is entering the realm of the somewhat technical but I’ll try to explain in an understandable way. Computer hard drives, the things that store information use things called “clusters” to locate things. Think of these as tiny litle boxes that you can put stuff in. Now we need a way to keep track of the things in these boxes, so we have to make a list. The more items we have, the longer the list and hence the larger the list file which in turn means longer to look through the list to find what you need. With me so far?

Ok, the next problem is this. These “boxes” or clusters have a pre-set size on the hard drive, they can’t be different sizes. Here is the interesting part, if you have one item that is large, too large for a single box, it can be split up to fill multiple boxes perfectly, and they will act like theyre just the single box containing that one item.

However, if you have a tiny item that doesn’t fill the cluster or box, the rest of the space in that box is wasted. So, for example, if you have an item that is 4bytes in size and a sector size of 4kb (four thousand bytes). It’s using 1/1000 of the space. The other 999/1000 in that box is then wasted. SO 500 4 byte files takes 2MB, that’s a lot of wasted space and a long list of unnecessary files to look through for only 2MB of your hard disk.

Treatment

So you’ve tried not to install too much, but you’ve been using this computer for a long time, and it’s getting slow. The next obvious step is “Disk Cleanup”. This will aloow you to remove junk from your hard drive after a long period of use. For several months upto a year or more of use it could remove as much as a Gigabyte or more (possible tens of thousands of files). This can make quite a difference.

So, how would you go about doing this? It’s quite simple really, if you go to “My Computer” or “Computer” as it is known since Windows 7 (maybe Vista too but that’s so long ago now I can’t remember). You find your hard drive, usually drive “C:” and click with your right mouse button to bring up what is called the “context-menu”, click “Properties” and you will be presented with something similar to the following window with a pie chart showing you the space useage on your hard drive.

If you click this, you computer will begin to scan for files to cleanup on your system. This can take a while if it hasn’t been done in quite a while.

After scanning completes, you will see a window where you can select what to cleanup, and an indication of how much space you’re going to retreive.

If you see a button “Cleanup system files” click on it, and the cleanup utility will re-scan, allowing you to complete a more thorough cleanup.

I have selected everything, including the recycle bin and downloaded program files. Make sure you don’t want any files before you go removing them, especially error reports. Only remove these if you PC is running without problems and you know you don’t need to send these off to Microsoft to help solve problems. I know I don’t need any of this, so I have selected everything. In my case, as you can see above, I will retreive 1.94GB of space. That’s a large amount that I will be happy to see empty to fill up with more useful things. So, click ok after you have selected everything you want to remove. You will be prompted to confirm deletion, click ok and you will see a small box with a progress bar informing you of the current progress.

This part can take quite a while depending on the speed of your computer and how many files your computer needs to cleanup. I recommend you run this process once a month, it can’t hurt.

Optional

The final point I will make I will call optional, because it will help somewhat in one sense, but hinder you slightly in another. Fortunately you can select which part you want to keep and which you don’t. This stage I will briefly explain how to have the Firefox web browser clear its history and browser files and content on each exit. This makes things easier because you can minimise the junk stored through web browsing without having to perform the action yourself each time the browser closes.

First I will explain why this information is kept. Usually, when you surf the web your browser will store images and files from certain web pages so that next time you load that page it won’t need to download them again, this is helpful if you have a slow internet connection or if you have a “metered” internet connection such as mobile internet or mobile broadband.

If you have high speed home broadband however that has no limit it might not help much, but in fact slow your computer down more if anything. Amongst other things, you computer can also offer to store passwords for you and usernames, to ease the logging in to web sites in the future, It’s a useful features that aides in security too from keyloggers and such. But that’s for another time.

So, If you have decided you don’t need to keep the saved content, you can have your browser remove this each time it exits by following the instructions below.

Clearing Firefox History on Exit

Open Firefox-> Click on the Tools menu and select Options… ->Click the Privacy Tab and you will be presented something similar to the window below.

The default state (I think) is to remember history. If you select the drop down box and change to custom, you will be presented withthe following;

You can of course choose the other options as you wish, but most importantly here is the options “Clear history when Firefox Closes”. Tick it, and then select “Settings…”

As you can see I have opted to keep my Saved passwords, Site Preferences, Active Logins, Site Preferences and the history and queue for my download manager (you might not have this, it’s an add-on I installed). If you are unsure what each of these options represent, click the Help buttonn for more info. Once you are done click Ok, and OK again. Your history will now be cleared each time you close your browser. Don’t forget though, some of these options mean you will have to log-in again to certain websites, and you may have to change settings in those pages again each time you visit. If it starts to become annoying, set some options back to normal, and then manually clear history every few weeks.

I hope this post was helpful and results may vary but hopefully their should be some difference. Please feel free to contact me if you want to see other topics posted here.