WOW, a thread that deals with probably my MOST favorite subject, “Garbage Removal” and system performance. (my speciallity)

“Disk Cleanup” is an MS App has been around since the Windows 98 days, and is ignored by 99.9999% of users.
The ones who DO use it are the ones where I put it on their Desktop as a part of a weekly Maintenance Routine. (that is IF they do their maintenance)

I run Disk Cleanup from a desktop shortcut, like this:

%SystemRoot%System32Cmd.exe /c Cleanmgr /sageset:65 & Cleanmgr /sagerun:65

But, in this form, it has to be RUN by the user, by clicking on the [OK] button after the program starts.
At least, once I set the things to delete, the program remembers those so the user only has to click on the [OK] button to run the program and remove the preset files. I always tell them: “Don’t change anything, just click the [OK] button.”

Now, I’d love to run that line from within my own XPCleanup.bat program, but I’m stuck, with wanting to send an [ENTER] keypress to that command, to operate it automatically.

So maybe someone knows how I can cause the above command to run within a batch file with NO operator intervention, by simulating an [ENTER] keypress.

I hope my post will be found to be in line with the original post and not as topic Hijacking.

Cheers Mates!
The Doctor 😎

TIF removal speeds things up because our system does not have to look at all that garbage first before going online and getting new pages. This sounds pretty simplistic, and I am NOT a network guy at all. Many of us now have fast cable connections, at least here in the US. It is faster for us to go to the web and load a fresh page rather than find the old page in history (and hope it’s not corrupted) then go out and find a new page and load it and compare the two then refresh the page and utilize resources to do all this while we are doing 3 other things with our PCes, etc. At least TMHO.

Same thing with all the other garbage that collects on our PCes. Windows tends to like to collect GB of old garbage. It’s like a hoarder on steroids. I can see keeping some of the newest lod files, but many have logs files from months or years ago as DrWho has suggested, then wonder why they are running short on disk space.

Okay, you asked for it.

1: Disk “Utilization” has IMHO to be separated in three subsets (talking about PCs only!):

1a: Disk physically full, that is 90% of space or more used: Much of the effect depends on the file system used. FAT machines used to get perceivably slower around 75% to 80% used space and more. I have seen NTFS systems more than 90% full and still running (maybe not great but running).

Main difference here IMHO the methods the OS uses to access FAT/MFT and from there finding free space and accessing data.

1b: File fragmentation naturally raises the number of physical read/write head movements and thus can add lots of latency and accesses to other tracks that would be avoided were the disk decently defragmented. Can “kill” some older PATA drives (remember those 30 and 60GB RLL drives?). Regularly defragmenting was a MUST from the beginnings through NT and early XP times.

Back then the trick was to have a dependable and efficient defragmenter program. MS’s own defragmenter was the clumsiest I have ever watched.

For most defragmenters I remember the rule of thumb was that you needed at least 25% free space for them to work well.

1c: I/O load: Several disk I/O intensive programs running concurrently and pushing the disk drive to it’s physical limits.

The only remedies I know for that are either a much faster disk drive (Solid State, IMHO the future anyway) or load balancing/distributing (batch instead of concurrently). Yes, I know about RAID but every disk subsystem has a physical throughput limit somewhere.

2: CPU bottleneck: Generally I see on plain vanilla usage home computers only very few CPU bottlenecks. I leave installations of Service Packs out of scope (W7 SP1 anyone?), they happen too rarely.

Older XP machines with less than 2.2Ghz P4, older Celeron or Turion CPUs just are sluggish, with almost any amount of RAM. Example with equal RAM, a 2Ghz P4 and a 2Ghz Celeron, main difference the P4 has depending on the model twice to four times the amount of L1 cache built in. The P4 feels significantly “zippier”, responses are more immediate. Yes this is human experience, not scientific measurements.

So far with most Windows systems I have seen more RAM has a much bigger positive effect on performance than a faster CPU. Which seems to show that at least some perceived CPU bottlenecks actually are I/O bottleneck because of paging – see below.

On modern multi-CPU machines stuff like video editing and rendering or huge spreadsheet computations can show limits of a CPU but I can’t comment since I have no experience in these fields.

3: Network latency: The only problem I ever encountered (besides outages) is slow DNS resolution and bottlenecks beyond my control (like the Chicago bottleneck). The former I solved with OpenDNS (or GoogleDNS if you want), the latter teaches me patience but occurs increasingly seldom.

My LAN is under my control and thus should never be an issue.

4: Insufficient memory: Again I believe this is two related but separate issues.

4a: RAM
Six or seven years ago XP ran fine with 512MB. The same machine now needs 1GB minimum, better more. For Vista and Win7 4GB IMHO is the minimum for satisfactory performance.

Do you have any idea how many machines are out there with 3GB dual channel memory? And all because of the limitation of the 32-bit architecture.

Supposedly we get the full speed of dual channel only when the chips are paired equally by speed and size. So the manufacturers throttled memory accesses knowingly. Ridiculous.

4b: Page file size
Have your customers ever called because of the “Insufficient virtual memory” message?

Microsoft still hangs on to an IMHO ridiculous formula for the page file size. IMHO this always was way too low. I don’t know for how many years on XP systems I always set page file size >=2GB or more with no difference between minimum and maximum sizes. Dynamic shrinking and enlarging of the page file are just additional I/Os.

If disk space is tight I get the space easily by limiting the space for System Restore significantly. This defaults to 15% of the gross disk capacity – which in turn is an absolutely ridiculous value on modern disks of many 100s of GB.

On Win7 I have not ever even looked at it – yet. :o:

5: System preferences
What IMHO is most important I have already mentioned:

As much RAM as the motherboard will hold (within reason…).

On XP: Reasonably large minimum page file size.

On FAT systems keep the disk de-fragmented or convert to NTFS (only after chkdsk and sfc!). And did I mention to keep the disk de-fragmented?

Especially in older XP systems with certain SIS and or VIA graphics chip sets turn ALL visual effects off! Much of that eye candy seems to be done by the CPU. Grrr.

Regularly remove leftover temporary files. CCleaner comes to mind as the tool of choice for grown-ups, Auslogics Temporary File Cleaner for my average customer.

———
I wonder what all I forgot to mention. Can’t wait for comments, suggestions and the seemingly in these issues hard to avoid chiming in as in “I am more right than you”.

I am sincerely glad that there are so many “smarter” people than me in this Lounge. As I get older it is getting harder to “fire up” my brain cell (singular). Perhaps it’s because I am not an educated computer tech person and did/do not work in the computer field. I am totally self taught (took a fortran programming course in 1970 as part of my electronics degree, but that’s it) and am still learning. Today I feel as though I have learned more. Now I have to digest some of it. That might be the problem. Guys I am humbled by your expertise. Please keep it up! Have a great day all of you!

WOW again!

That was a long and very detailed dissertation, but essentially correct.

It’s a little bit ‘Pie in the sky” though, for as a computer tech, when I get a call that the resident PC is taking a half hour to boot up and is so slow to shut down that the user is just killing the power and walking away, I’m very limited at what I can do.

I can’t add ram, I can’t install an SSD drive, nor can I change the CPU, so what CAN I do?

Well, I can clean up the mess and get the PC pretty much back to like-new condition, with a few improvements.
Even with a brand new PC, right out of the box, I can improve performance by over 50%, because Windows XX is written with so many SAFE defaults that it only runs at a small percentage of the capability of the hardware. (CPU, Ram & Hard Drive)

Without going into the details of where I cut and trim, I clean out every program and unneeded file on the HD that is just loading down the PC. I set up my own XPCleanup.bat program, (or VICleanup.bat for Vista or W7Cleanup.bat for Win-7) in the Startup folder, so that every time the PC is turned on, the junk from the previous session is removed, in just a few seconds.

I give the user a “Weekly Maintenance” routine and an instruction sheet on how to do it, which includes running the “Disk Cleanup” program in extended mode, as I outlined earlier, followed by a defrag. Regardless of what anyone thinks of the MS Defrag, it is probably the safest defrag program out there. *
* NEVER RUN DEFRAG BEFORE REMOVING ALL THE JUNK FROM THE HARD DRIVE. (WHY DEFRAG JUNK?)

Just one time, not too long ago, I ran the Auslogics Defrag program. It made such a total mess out of my HD that I had to do a Backup + Restore to get my drive back in shape again. That program had my files scattered from one end of the HD to the other. NEVER AGAIN!

Ok guys and dolls, I gotta run, but “I’ll be back!”

Cheers Mates!
The Doctor 😎

Tinto, I guess it’s more the old page gets queried and loaded while the web site is queried, then the new page is loaded. The PC is working finding the correct old page at the same time finding the correct web site to get the new page, rather than just getting the new page from the get go. The other thing is, and perhaps this is just my paranoia, having this old info sitting on my PC is showing where I’ve been, perhaps holding some of my personal info or sign on info, just waiting for someone to break through and grab it. Paranoid, you betcha, but then I have both a sister and sister-in-law than have had their info stolen and have had terrible times solving those problems. I cannot swear this is what happened to them. No one can, so yes I’m paranoid and I wipe everything regularly.

And yes I do have a fast connection. Time Warner Road Runner, approx 15.5 mb/s download, 1.5 mb/s upload. Pretty fast.

As another data point, I only clean up TIF and temp files once or twice a year and don’t experience any slowdowns or speedups with the cleanup of gigs of temporary files. But then my system disk is 70% free space. Just removed 1.5 gigs of temp and TIF space on a client XP laptop with no effect on performance. Cleaned up the number of programs in Windows startup and that had considerable positive improvement in performance. In my experience, the only time temp file cleanup has had an impact on performance is when the disk is close to full (80% full or more).

Things I have found that improve performance:
1. Unnecessary startup items in windows boot.
2. Malware removal or corrupted system files.
3. Disable Windows eye candy (Window animations, transparent background)
4. Add memory if less than 1 gig on XP, 3 gigs on Vista/Windows 7
5. Temp files only if the system disk is close to full.

Jerry

Just a few hasty and random thoughts:

From the disk performance aspect, having enough free space and keeping fragmentation levels low, so that there’s ample contiguous free space for streaming video temporary storage, for example, is a good starting point. The 25% free space factor is pretty close to that ideal, just look at how disk drive performance drops off when reading/writing in the last 25% or so of a spinning drive. So, if you add a % of a few GB above that for big temp. files, you should keep the drive performing close to the optimum. Say around 30% free space is good, less would need some serious attention.

As for TIFs, I think they’re in a different category as they are (usually) very small files, they don’t require contiguous space and Windows will place them ‘randomly’, probably in the first available space closest to the heads current position(s). On a sessional basis, many are also duplicated in the paging file and will be pulled from there for reuse (or usually from a ReadyBoost drive, if that’s in use).

For borderline disk I/O bottleneck cases, some tweaking of background NTFS data read/writing might improve things a little, such as disabling the creation of 8.3 file names.

Of course, if the machine has multiple drives and to a lesser extent, ReadyBoost and/or RAM drives further tweaks can be made.

Naming no names, but I see many answers along the lines of “This is what I do with MY computer”. (That’s fine! You do that.)
That’s totally immaterial, when you’re a computer tech who has to deal with hundreds of computers, some of them not having any service for maybe the last ten years.

I recently ran my XPCleanup.bat program on an OLD PC that essentially had never had any service. Bootup took many minutes and shutdown was well near impossible. A defrag took hours and hours and simple scans like from an Anti-Virus or Anti-Spyware program was nearly an all day affair.
Anyway, when I ran my little cleanup batch file, it removed over 100,000 garbage files.
You say that a temp file or TIF doesn’t slow down a computer, but it sure as heck WILL if you ever do any maintenance or have a Good AV or AS program that does a full scan of the HD every day.

That’s why I get every file off of the HD that doesn’t absolutely HAVE to be there.
It’s not just to save space, although it does, but it speeds up many operations of the PC.
I just took over 20 gig’s of junk off of a PC this past week. The owner of that PC was elated at how much better his PC ran once I was done working on it.

The Doctor 😎

PS: I’m still looking for a way to run the MS “Disk Cleanup” automatically from a batch file. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Here’s the line I need to run:
%SystemRoot%System32Cmd.exe /c Cleanmgr /sageset:65 & Cleanmgr /sagerun:65

Addendum: The above mentioned problem has been solved by adding “Echo. |” (sans quotes) to the beginning of the command.
Sageset only needs to run once to set the parameters for Disk Cleanup and then sagerun will do the same job over and over again. I have it now running nicely.
Problem Solved!

That’s so true DrWho. Any time you run a complete scan all the junk files will be scanned as well including all the old TIF as well as the many year’s worth of old log files, etc, etc, etc. And all this stuff has to be defragged whenever you do defrag, etc, etc, etc. I just feel more warm and cozy getty rid of this stuff. I did notice marked improvement on my mom’s PC a while ago when I started getting her to do the cleanup stuff on her PC. DrWho I did set up a Cleanup batch file for her and set up showed her how to do other cleanup and defrag chores. The first time I did this stuff she could not believe how much more responsive her PC was. She also could not believe how quickly web pages loaded. No, I cannot explain the why it works, but getting rid of the old TIF did speed things up.

Installing programs at the limit of or beyond your hardware’s capacity
Another big problem with slow computers are, especially with the novice user, the tendancy to over install programs for which, in many instances, the physical hardware is just not up to the task. Not merely installing programs for which the computer’s hardware may be just barely able to run, but having every feature of it running at a full “on” configuration.

“Buying cheap assembly line computers with paultry hardware and expecting to throw everything at it and have it run everything smoothly”.
Use and run your computer within it’s means.

Failure to maintain computer
(The number one novice trap)
Basically this is much of what was previously mentioned; Not cleaning up the junk accumulates over time and failure to uninstall
the programs that have long since been unused. These are definitely among the root causes.

Poor Computer Habits and Bad File System Organization
One of the biggest things I see is the tendancy toward disorganization.
*Dumping everything onto the desktop is just one good example of poor organization.
*Having a very large amount of your personal data and file accumulates intermixed with the operating system will produce the
same effect as junk file accumulates over time. You’ll get a gradual slowdown of everything over time, this might even seem
imperceptible at first.
*Flat out overt laziness; Doing everything & anything to avoid a clean install. Just prolonging the inevitable imo.
Windows 7 is the most secure and sophisticated MS operating system to date, but that does not mean a clean install is even remotely
not needed anymore. Novices are the ones who need it most.
Many of us have learned how to use and maintain computers by our own mistakes, we’ve fudged them up and have learned how to
do clean installs and have learned from our mistakes. In a way we deny others this in order to impart to them an “instant gradification”.
Sometimes we need to realize that helping too much makes people stupid.
…Then again, there will always be a subset of people that will never be computer literate.

For those of us who are the “kid” next door (OK I’m using the term pretty loosly here) What’s In Startupis a very easy to use app for stopping those apps that always want to load at Windows startup. Eike I also have Autoruns.

30132-WhatsInStartup

That is correct. But for the average user that really is afraid of tinkering too far What’s in Startup is an easy way to start the process and get their feet wet. Once they get that taste, perhaps they will venture further and say “Hey that wasn’t hard, maybe I can do this” and take so more baby steps. That’s how many of us learned how to do this. Start small and gradually build up to the more complex stuff. Build up our confidence.

I already know that some “Expert” will say it doesn’t make any difference, but one thing I do when I set up a new PC or do a first time tune-up on an older PC, is shut down or put into Manual mode, all those redundant Services that Windows installs by default. I’ve mentioned SAFE defaults before but it’s really one of my pet peeves.

To make sure I don’t miss one, or set something wrong, I’ve committed everything to a batch file, that I call
SetServices.bat
It only takes a few seconds to run and DOES improve performance.

In XP I can shut down as many as 11 to 24 services and in Win-7, the number stays at 24, but that’s still a work in progress. 🙂

A good source for information about that can be found on “Black Viper’s website”.

If it only makes 1% improvement in performance, that’s 1% we didn’t have before. Eh?

Cheers Mates!
The Doctor 😎

I don’t play much with services on my customer’s computers because I find it hard to predict what their future requirements are and see very little performance gain from messing with them. If you do mess with them, its safer to set an unneeded service to manual rather than disabled. There is something to be said for satrow’s comment:

Not solely for performance reasons, the less you have loaded or accessible, the smaller your profile is to potential attacks – if it ain’t loaded (as in it’s disabled) it’s pretty hard to squeeze malware into it.

but the problem is minimized with decent anti-malware programs. Dr Who’s methods obviously work for him and I have a happy customer base with mine as well.

Jerry

satrow, I tried to agree with you. A good example is disabling networking services, a possible source of malware infections, if you don’t use it. But 6 months down the road, if one of my customers gets a new tablet or laptop and decide they want to network them, I don’t want to get a call asking why it doesn’t work. This whole thread has been very useful but can border on theology, sort of like the free AV discussion under Windows Secrets column. We just need to keep the discussion civil as it has been and everyone will pick and choose what works for them.

Jerry

Sorry Jerry, my last post didn’t quite work out as intended, I was (poorly) trying to clarify a few things for those that may have been unsure as to what had recently been referred to. If you get time, study the reg. patches that can be created at BV’s site, they may have uses not dissimilar to the old (underused) Hardware Profiles on XP, in that you can enable/disable a batch of Services by just rebooting.

Anyway, enough of my peregrinations >Thread: Disk cleanup and performance improvements? > back to normal, carry on all!

Some random thoughts on TIFs.

When one starts a PC for the first time the TIF cache is empty therefore everything has to be downloaded. (slower?)

After a few days of use the cache will probably contain the static parts of the websites one frequents (faster?)

Later on the cache will become full and older elements will need to be removed (I/O hit and as a result slower?)

So, by my reckoning, we need a browser that knows where you are going to go before you do!

There are observed performance increases by regularly maintaining a system and/or data drive, but why?
What are your experiences and understanding?

Software

Normally when we run any particular software application we get the intended and desired result, which is the task at hand for which the software was intended, in a relative & timely manner.
Occasionally there are problems, software misbehaves, code gets corrupt, the memory on which the code resides get corrupt, a wide variety of issues can occur related to program interactions in other words. The language upon which all software, including drivers, are written, is far from perfect.
A good example of this is any piece of software you download and install will have a log detailing the bug fixes from the previous version.
The very fact that computers need to be maintained is a testament to the above.

We all know what bad software is, remember AOL?

Bad software is perhaps the worst of it, most all software applications are far from perfect but will run just as effectively all the same.
Improper or corrupt uninstall routines leave components behind, that in turn become part of the operating system’s file system tally
and may or may not interact in a negative way with other components, …or future components. No way to know for sure. There are so many variables.
I’m thinking that an accumulation over time will contribute to degredation of overall perfromance between the application itself and the operating system.
Maybe this is something only a Ph.D can answer, who knows.

The operating system is no different than any other piece of written software, Microsoft’s Windows Update is a testament to that.
Previous MS operating systems were highly prone to degradation by having some or many of their root components replaced or otherwise modified by other software applications and their processes. Although Windows 7 is purported to have made some great strives to correct this anomaly, it truly remains to be seen in it’s full entirety.

Hardware drivers fall into the same general catagory as does any other piece of software in that bugs are addressed from version to version.
A driver issue may have a cascading affect simply by the fact that they are the interactive elements between the physical hardware of the computer and the software environment of the operating system. The mentality “if it aint broke don’t fix it” is not fully correct when it comes to drivers. Many times one won’t see the hidden effects of accumulated bugs until their effect becomes catastrophic. ie some new variable interacts with them.

What we commonly refer to as junk is also the accumulative effects of bugs, errent code, large amounts of potentially useless code that some process somewhere is trying to read through and make sense of.
If you have a computer that has been running reasonably well with considerable up time, take look through the event viewer, you may be surprised to see so many yellow flags and errors that you were not previously aware of that up until now may or may not seem to impact performance much.

The “WHY” of the need to maintain a computer’s performance is rooted firmly in the fact that the technology, which is a constant work in progress, is far from perfect.

,

Wheeewwww. And all I said was I think my PC works better when I keep the junk off it. I am humbled by you gentlemen! :clapping:

Another big issue when it comes to performance and usability…

USER INTERACTION & CHOICE

User interaction has probably the most profound effect on computer performance since the average user is one of the biggest variables in this equation, along with software.
Everything about habits that bring about infection to choices in what’s installed and run will have an effect on performance. Sometimes no amount of upkeep or maintenance will fix.

As I attempted to touch on earlier, it’s the user who will contribute much of the issues we see both in the day to day operation of the computer and in the long term.
One doesn’t need to understand a whole lot about computers in order to use them, but one does need to know some basic precepts.

This is one…

Matching Hardware with Expectation & task
Purchasing a computer for a specific task or a specific set of tasks, whether the task be as simple and rudimentary as surfing the web and generating email to playing intensive games, one needs to buy into hardware that will get the job done. It would then stand to reason that one should have an idea of the hardware requirements of the task prior to purchase.

This is not always so because we see folks quite often running multiple software on inadequate hardware, or mismatching their perceptions of what their actual needs are relative to hardware requirements and cost. Expectations are out of sync with reality through lack of knowledge.
If one doesn’t understand this basic precept then they’ll have problems, you’ll never hear of anyone complaining that their computer is too fast or too powerful.

I recently came across a laptop with 64 bit Windows 7 Home Premium installed on it. It had a single core processor less than 2 GHz, and 2 GBs of DDR3 RAM at probably 800 MHz.
This is what I call a market place joke, and a very good reason to look and think carefully about exactly what you are buying.
Who in their right mind would buy something like this and hope to do real work if it were not for a novice?

The laptop in question had quite a bit installed, not to mention full drive encryption, which on a 5400 RPM drive and the above specs can be somewhat taxing in itself.
Curiously the user had made some meaningful attempts to improve performance, I had noticed 8-10 entries in the startup menu of MSCONFIG were unchecked.
The performance was still horrible. Cleaning this up means uninstalling programs and ensuring there is no remnants of them left behind. I had to also disable a few services as well, along with disabling indexing, system restore, remote access, and others, I still could not get the performance I thought I should have gotten out of it.

Bottom line;
The user has to be able to use and maintain the computer’s software environment within the limitations of the physical hardware specifications, otherwise one is going to hit the wall when it comes to performance and satisfaction.
The above system clearly wasn’t meant for almost any level of productivity.

Clint, I think your last paragraph is one of the most difficult to teach some of the average users out there. Many of these average users get their PCes to play games, send and receive email and surf the web a little. My mother is a prime example of this. She has had a PC for almost 10 years now. She started with XP on a hand me down PC. When she started having problems with that PC, we got together and bought her a nice mid-range Vista desktop which she still owns. I have taught her finally how to clean her junk off her PC (I set up a Cleanup batch file and do have CCleaner for temp file cleanup only). She does finally know how to update her AV/AM app (MSE) and run periodic scans and does know how to let WU do it’s thing. She does know how to update Malwarebytes and Spybot regularly and run regular scans with them. Guess what, it only took 10 years to get her to this point!

She still contacts me almost weekly with emails she gets about special deals she receives, even after I have told her repeatedly that she should just delete them all. Every time we visit my wife or I have to assist loading pictures from their digital camera or email to her HD so she can look at them because she can’t remember how to do it. I wrote the steps down for her.

Now this is a fairly intelligent woman who has a son that has at least one brain cell that works intermittently that helps her out with her PC. How many PC users out ther don’t have me, or you, or Fred, or Jerry, or Wayne or whoever to help them with their PC needs. I would suspect thousands of times more than that do. It is very easy to see why people have PCes that are so messed up.

I guess to sum up, yes it is vital to be able to use and maintain our PCes, but it is equally as important to attempt to continue to get the word out to all those others how important this chore is.

Sorry for the long rant.

So that we do not get off topic I will PM you Wayne.

Hey Dr, since I don’t do this every day, I spent several more hours than that setting up my granddaughter’s new PC. I did remove all the D(H)ell stuff (as you called it :D) did quite a bit of customizing, used quite a few of your Win7 rar stuff, not all but quite a bit. I’ve loaded quite a few apps, got rid of the Dell Recovery partition (burned that to my Ext HD as an Image just in case) just have one large HD at present. Created an Image of the final setup as my Gold Standard Image for her. When I present the gift I will discuss the pros/cons of partitioning a data drive for her.

I do have a Cleanup batch file that I included the Sageset:99, Sagerun:99 commands as well as the other commands you use. I also do use CCleaner and Privacy Mantra (I realize you do not use CCleaner, but I do not have a problem with it) I will discuss with her how important it is to keep things clean.

Thank you to everyone for the fantastic suggestions throughout this thread on the importance of maintenance. This has got to be one of my all time favorite threads on one of the most important subjects IMHO, so to all of the contributors here a hearty :fanfare: :clapping: :thewave:

These maintenance tips were all about platter drives I believe. Beware using most if not all of them with SSD drives. Perhaps those of you that have these drives can chime in. or better yet, perhaps a Moderatoe or Administrator can move this last couple posts to a new thread for just SSD’s to give them the exposure they deserve. Having them tacked on here will bury them in this thread.

Well Tinto, I do use CCleaner, generally for temp file cleanup, but when I uninstll an app, whether with Windows uninstaller or Revo uninstaller I run CCleaner registry cleaner to see what’s left and if I find something from the recently uninstalled app I remove it. Never had a single failure because of it. I’m sold that this helps for the reasons you have stated in your last post. Perhaps this leftover stuff will never cause a problem. And Revo does not leave much behind, I’ll grant you, but I always find one or two items, sometimes a few. And I’ve never had a problem related to these removals.

Cleaning up an SSD isn’t too much different than a mechanical drive except that one does not defragment a SSD.
There will be some specific read/write tweaks that one may want initiate on an SSD, but for the most part, cleaning up the drive will be the same as discussed here.

One of your best advantages with a SSD will be the overal performance increase over mechanical drives.
But this does not negate the need to keep the drive well maintained and groomed to be lean.

Ensure you have as much free space as you can stand, the more free space on a SSD the better.
If your overal computer specs are decent, and you didn’t buy into some cheep 80 dollar SSD, you can easily disable prefetch or superfetch, limit the PF to it’s bare minimum.
Set the PF to a minimum and a maximum, whatever minimum it will take to preserve file error logging.

Tinto, I use the pro version and really like it.

Particularly the feature of installing with Revo and that keeps a log of everything the install does so when you un-install it use the log to un-install..
There are other features in the Pro version I also like.

I use the Pro version as well, but only because it also can uninstall 64 Bit apps. The free version is limited to 32 Bit apps. I do not at this time have Revo running in real time monitoring installs. I do not see a big advantage to this as I normally only see 2 or 3 items at most (sometimes none) left after the Revo uninstall, and those are cleaned with CCleaner. I would rather not have anything extra running in real time than the bare minimum unless I’m working with it. All that’s normally running on my PC is MSE, Online Armor forewall and Alps Touchpad for my laptop. That’s it other than the MS services. That’s all the 3rd party S/W. I shut down everything else.

You would be very surprised in most cases how much Revo finds after it finishes with either the Windows uninstaller or the apps own uninstlaller (yes it starts with either of these that is available) then does a scan for leftovers. Remember that if an uninstall requires a restart, DO NOT restart prior to scanning for leftover items. Wait until after Revo finishes. I always do the Advanced, most agressive scan and always delete everything found and so far have never had a single problem. I try and throw out a lot of S/W.

I suppose if I were trying a piece of S/W I was unsure about, having Revo running during that install might be beneficial.

hey Ted, maybe we should see what PC Mag has to say about this…

I used to read PC Mag but have not for a few years. I still have a digital subscription to PCWorld and love this one. I’m switchind all my subscriptions to digital. Killing fewer trees that way. Quite honestly if it weren’t for the lack of 64 Bit support for Revo I would not have bought the Pro edition of it, but I thought this this was the feature that convinced me. I do not want MalwareBytes to run in real time, so see no need for the Pro version. The free version does everything I want.

Ted, I don’t get any of them anymore because they just seem to be bloated with advertising.

I use Maywarebytes in real time…

What I like about Revo pro is that I can force un-install for programs that are not listed in the program list to un-install…

Tinto, I believe when you initially install Revo it’s the PRO version and you have, I believe, 30 days and then it reverts to the free version which doesn’t include a lot of the tools that are in the free version, like the force install and registry cleaner etc.

Most of the other tools available in Revo Uninstaller I have not tried. Just as many of the additional tools in CCleaner I have not tried. I suppose I should do some of this investigation at some point in time. I will see what happens.

Example 1. A system that has high disk utilisation will benefit from a disk clean up because free space is generated which can then be rationalized using a defrag, making the drive work less to access the data. In effect reducing the I/O bottleneck. But that only should a marked effect on a drive that is heavily used.

With the HDD seek and access speeds (even before SSDs) being so much faster today than they were 10-15 years ago, the impact of a fragmented HDD just isn’t what it used to be. I suspect that much of the emphasis on defragmentation is based on lessons learned “back in the day” and passed on as gospel over the years (just like people who learned to pump their carburated car’s accellerator a couple of times on a cold day still doing it today on a fuel-injected car).

One time that I can think of fragmentation’s still having a significant impact is on a nearly-full system drive–in this case, the Windows swapfile can end up getting fragmented (due to insufficient contiguous space). As even a 6GB Windows 7 system still makes ample use of the swapfile (I have mine isolated on its own partition and constantly monitor activity on that partition, so I’m not making this up), having a fragmented swapfile will slow things down noticeably. That said, it’s probably true that the best solution is to first (a) isolate the swapfile on a dedicated partition and (b) replace that nearly-full HDD with a larger one (they’re not that expensive, even if the price is still recovering from the Thailand flood).

Other than with the swapfile issue (and maybe even with that), I suspect that as soon as we’re fully on SSDs, the whole defrag utility discussion will finally die.

Example 2. Many applications come bundled with branding and additional features that are configured to load at startup. This can affect the CPU utilisation and memory utilisation, both of which can have a detrimental effect on performance. Being careful during an installation can often allow one to request not to install additional features. Using msconfig, or 3rd-party apps can get to the root of the issue, buy preventing various startup items from launching. Fine and well, but other than consuming RAM and potentially causing disk swapping, a start up item should not generate a CPU bottleneck after it has loaded.

As you pointed out, this is mainly a startup issue, which is why the articles on this subject are all about minimizing the startup time. I don’t know about you, but I restart only once every 5-15 days or so, so this seems more relevant to those who restart regularly (like software testers and reviewers).

Example 3. Browsing the internet may be more responsive if the Temporary Internet Files are rationalised, but the purpose of these files are to provide a local cache to reduce network utilisation, so if there is no local cache, the system must download the files from the web server again. That suggests that a total removal of temporary internet files may actually have a detrimental effect. On the flip side however, if the drive is getting full, removal of these files may improve the disk performance as in Example 1. Also if a corrupt file is located in the cache, removing it would be beneficial to prevent errors.

I’ve occasionally had to clear the Internet cache in order to get a flash video to play. Other than that, I can’t say that it’s ever posed a performance problem. I still let CCleaner clean out those cached files for me, but only on those rare times that I run it (every 2-3 months?).

One more thing: Cached and temp files can slow down a backup and use more of the backup medium, but the solution there is to be less broad about what you’re including in your backup.

Example 5. Poorly a poorly configures system can often be helped by resetting some parameters to default, for example internet explorer settings. This isn’t really disk cleanup or removal of data, but has been included for completeness.

Firefox profile preference settings can get corrupted, but the symptom is usually a freeze, not a slowdown.

What are your experiences and understanding?

The only other factor I’ve looked at is the load time for fonts, primarily with respect to how it affects the start-up time for Word. Just for fun, I’ve backed up and uninstalled the fonts I don’t regularly use (which wasn’t as clear a thing as I had expected) and use a font utility to load the backups on demand. Having done that, I can’t really swear that I’ve seen a significant improvement in Word’s startup time–but it’s not costing me anything to leave it this way, and I do like that the fonts list is about 80% shorter now.

Kris,

First, Welcome to the Lounge, and your English is very good.

I also do not know of any handbook of cleanup/maintenance chores. Here’s the way I started. Go ahead and start with the oldest/slowest of the bunch and see if it makes a difference. If it does, it will give you the initiative and determination to do so with the newer PCes. Be advised that I do not know how the advice works when interacting between an English language version and a German language (????) version of Windows.I assumed here you are using the German language version.

Start with a small batch file that was developed by Fred Langa back in Win 95 I think and modified through the versions. Just copy these into notepad and save as a .bat file on your desktop. select all the check boxes when they are presented. If you know any dos you can actually add to this batch file. All it is doing is telling the batch file to open a cmd window and running the commands to delete all items in certain temporary folders. If you have other temporary folders by all means add more line that add the paths to those folders. In Win XP there are temp Internet file folders that can be added but I do not have the valid paths any more to those folders so I would not wish to give you bad info.

Start your copy on the next line.

cleanmgr /sageset:99
del /q /s “C:Users”username”AppDataLocalTemp*.*” (please note, this line is specific to Win 7 I believe. It can just be deleted if you do not use Win 7)
del /q /s “C:WindowsTemp*.*”
del /q /s “C:Temp*.*”
cleanmgr /sagerun:99
Pause

End your copy on the previous line.

The sageset/sagerun command runs the Windows Disk Cleanup utility on steroids.

Next I would download the CCleaner and the Privacy Mantraapps and run the temp file cleanup areas. Be careful on what you choose to clean up. Same about interactions with language.

Since you are going to start with the oldest and slowest of the PCes you might want to check out the registry cleaner section. After you analyze, look through the entries. You will find MANY entries, especially the first time. Since it sounds like this is a “throw away” PC anyway, I would just go for it. You will find dozens, if not hundreds of entries of orphaned or leftover entries from apps you might have uninstalled years before. These old uninstallers never did a good job. Heck even modern uninstallers do a terrible job. That’s why most of us are switching to Uninstaller apps.

Just try these things to start and see what happens.

Note: You will have to escuse my English, after all it is my first language and I have developed nasty habits of using slang. If I have used any terms that you do not understand please ask what the heck I am talking about.

Ok, did not realize Sageset/sagerun would be remembered. The original batch file I used was from Fred Langa way back in Win 95 I believe.