Me?.. I get 6 or 7 years without a reinstall but I use a lot of cleanup
> > utilities and have had lots of practice keeping the junk out of the system
> > so... don't try this at home kids... B)
Best tool I've found yet is called Easy Cleaner, by Toni Arts. It does the
>registry cleaning, searches for duplicate files, has disk usage graphs, and
>more all in one very light app.
That's actually one of the tools on my system..
I find different regcleaners find and miss different things so
it's handy to have more than one, although you have to know
what's going on well enough to have it Not remove things that
might be needed when running some of the more aggressive ones.
JV16 Power Tools is a pretty thorough one with other utilities
built in as well. TweakNow Reg Cleaner is another that clearly
points out what is safe to remove and what it's not certain is
safe so you can leave the less certain ones alone.
CCleaner is a nice program for cleaning up the junk files and cookies
and such with the added bonus of being user set to ignore certain files, cookies and folders so you don't hurt the things you do want to keep.
I have a couple of things that can track every change made to the
hard drive and registry when something is installed so it's easier
to clean up properly later if you decide not to keep it.
InControl is one of those but I'm not sure which of the newer
versions of Windows it supports.
I also do a manual backup of the registry and main Windows INI
files before installing anything so that, worst case, I can boot
using something else and replace the system files with copies
just a few minutes old.
Treesize Pro (I think there's still a freeware version too) is
handy for looking at your drive to see where big files are
located, often ones you don't need anymore.
The free version of the Newsletter 'Windows Secrets' has a good
article this week on cleaning the junk out of Windows 7.
A friend of mine recently had amazing results repairing two
computers that were virtually unusable running a program
called AVG PC Tuneup (from the AVG Anti-Virus people).
Looking closely at what it's supposed to be able to do,
which didn't strike me as all that much, I was amazed it
worked so well, but it did.
They have a 1-time 24 hour free trial version online.
Possibly another regcleaner utility would have helped him
out just as much had he tried that first.
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þ SLMR Rob þ I'd rather be anatomically than politically correct! þ
þ PDQWK 2.52 #17
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