CleanSweep2 — When you need extra hard-drive space fast

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FREEWARE SPOTLIGHT By Deanna McElveen My first use of Windows was 3.1. Back then, I didn’t know how fast a graphical user interface was supposed to be
[See the full post at: CleanSweep2 — When you need extra hard-drive space fast]

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WSjaflady, SupremeLaW, Norio, Andy M, berniec, DLivesInTexas

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Dear Deanna:

It sounds like CleanSweep2 is named after the original CleanSweep which was a third party Windows 95 product bought by Microsoft and built into Windows as the current Disk Cleanup.  Bravo to the author for his or her hat-tip to Windows history!

But it has always seemed to me that this is an obsoleted problem.  Hard disk space today is no longer an issue of any consequence, unless the stuff taking up the space slows Windows down.     That does not seem to be the case with any of the items listed, and many of them contain information that might be unexpectedly useful at some future time.

The reason I say this is an obsoleted problem (and has been for many years) is because you can now buy a Samsung 500 GB 870 EVO laptop replacement hard drive for just $64, with corresponding higher capacities equally inexpensive.   Relative to this, 8 GB of hard drive space saved is hardly worth the time to think about.

To me,  a preferred solution is to simply clone the current hard drive to a suitably large SSD and keep moving along.

Best,

— AWRon

 

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AWRon,

What we are seeing in our store is people buying cheap laptops with 256GB or even 128GB SSDs out of financial necessity. Many could barely afford the laptop let alone the money or know how to upgrade the hard drive. Furthermore, when most average users run out of space it’s a sudden thing for them because they had to download a large file. When you’re sitting in a college chemistry class, you don’t always have the time to get up and install a new SSD during the lecture. But you still have to save your notes.

For things like this, I don’t find the program is obsolete in the least.

Deanna

OlderGeeks.com

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MHCLV941, WSjaflady, SupremeLaW

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I tried this to get rid of update files, It made no difference. After running it I ran Windows cleanup and found over 3Gb of update files still there, which I then cleaned.
Disappointed.
A1ex

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A1ex,

Are you running the program as administrator? Also, if you have updates which are trying to finish downloading then the program cannot remove them because they are in use. Try going into your Windows Update settings and pause the updates. Reboot and then try again.

Deanna

OlderGeeks.com

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SupremeLaW

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Thanks Deanna,

I am running as administrator, and no updates are pending.

I should have mentioned I found this problem on both Windows 7 & 10, which I dual boot

Rgards

A1ex

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Hey, all.

A few reports of CleanSweep2 and hits with anti-virus software. These are totally false positives due to some of the things the program does for you. If you are using a “falsely-detect-them-all-as-malware-and-let-the-gods-sort-them-out” kind of antivirus program, there are many more intelligent solutions out there. Give Malwarebytes a try. We run it on all 14 of our family and business computers. If we get a hit on Malwarebytes, we get real concerned because false positives rarely happen with it.

Here is the VirusTotal report for the zip file:

https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/9bbf34cf3f2074789dc5da09148b52414ff94d25ca6276b28db1031be4942f68

There are two hits (false hits) for the actual executable on VirusTotal:

(Note: These two hits are from Cynet and SecureAge APEX. If you ever use VirusTotal, you already know that these two would find viruses in a picture of a baby seal.)

https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/2dc02144053620126c9ddabc47b7ab33d1dce25f6b5c771945a2f0f6efa6952a

Deanna

OlderGeeks.com

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WSjaflady, SupremeLaW, satrow

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Where can I find good reliable info on 2 things:

1.  Excellent free antivirus software
2. Same as above but on a CD that can be booted

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Marvin,

Good, free antivirus software is quickly becoming a rarity as more and mors smaller companies like Avast and AVG get gobbled up by large companies. I cannot recommend any good ones that won’t constantly bug you about buying something (looking at you Avast and AVG). Malwarebytes is well worth the $39 per year.

Have a look at our bootable selections here:
https://www.oldergeeks.com/downloads/category.php?id=229
I’m a big fan of Antivirus Live CD.

Deanna
OlderGeeks.com

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SupremeLaW

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Marvin Moss wrote:

Excellent free antivirus software

With Windows 10/11 you have Microsoft Defender build-in.

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I suppose this is the software that the author talks about?
https://github.com/thomasloupe/CleanSweep2

Interesting software. When I have time I may test it to see if it suits me.

Personally I consider current antivirus software to be mostly useless and often create more problems than they solve (false positives being the most annoying), having used some of them like AVG in the past. Now I don’t use any of them myself on any of my Windows systems.

Hope for the best. Prepare for the worst.

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SupremeLaW

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Admittedly, AVG Internet Security requires some time on a learning curve.

We found that it’s more efficient by limiting scans to the most active partitions.

Also, we DISABLED automatic software updates but ENABLED automatic updates of virus definitions.

Also, certain defaults were found to induce performance penalties e.g. the custom “enhanced” firewall can be DISABLED to allow the default Windows firewall to operate instead.

But, if the AVG enhanced firewall is DISABLED, be sure to double-check that the Windows default firewall is ENABLED.  (Check with AVG tech support to confirm this “bug” has been fixed.)

A 2-year license for AVG Internet Security on 3 x PCs only cost us $25.00 USD recently.

If you don’t mind a little time climbing the learning curve, that’s a pretty good deal, imho.

 

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One necessary feature of rotating platter drives aka “HDD” (Hard Disk Drives) is the way binary data is recorded on concentric circular “tracks”.

In order to maintain nearly constant linear recording density, outermost tracks have more raw data than innermost tracks.

The best way to visualize this feature is the formula for circumference of a circle:  Pi x Diameter

Thus, the amount of raw binary digits on any given circular track is directly proportional to its diameter.

HDDs begin allocating raw data to the outermost tracks first, then to smaller and smaller tracks as the HDD begins to fill up.

Also, to access tracks with smaller diameters, the read/write armature must travel a slightly greater distance than the time required to access outermost tracks.  This adds extra “latency” time to routine I/O requests on the smaller, innermost tracks.

Fortunately, SSDs do not suffer from such mechanical features that necessarily cause HDDs to slow down as they fill up.

To demonstrate those mechanical features in a dramatic way, we often advised HDD users to switch to a paging file created by CONTIG in a dedicated partition formatted with the outermost tracks.  But, this was a highly technical solution for PCs with slow HDDs.

BEST WAY now is to assign the OS and most active data partitions to fast SSDs, ideally NVMe SSDs.

MAX HEADROOM for PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSDs is almost 4,000 MB/second (8G/8.125 x 4);  by comparison, MAX HEADROOM for SATA-III 6G SSDs is only 600 MB/second (6G/10).

Hope this helps.

p.s.  attached is an empirical chart showing how all HDDs slow down when doing I/O on smaller and smaller tracks.

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AWRon wrote:

But it has always seemed to me that this is an obsoleted problem.

Agree to disagree.  No matter how big a drive gets, users can and do fill them up.  Music, photos, videos, books, etc. take up space.  Lots of space.

Also, do you understand that the Samsung EVO 500 GB drive does not install itself?   The user who is having the “obsoleted problem” is going to have to lay more money to have the old drive migrated to this new drive and have it installed.   Odds are that will be more expensive than the SSD itself.

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Deanna McElveen wrote:

What we are seeing in our store is people buying cheap laptops with 256GB or even 128GB SSDs out of financial necessity

That’s the problem with laptops at just about any retailer.  Everything is about price and the couple of bucks saved with a small to puny SSD can be what makes the sale for a user who really doesn’t know what they are buying.

Before Microsoft issued its diktat mandating SSDs, there were cheap laptops on the market with 5400 RPM HDDs, though most tended to be 1 TB drives.   Another marketing ploy.

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oldfry

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Deanna McElveen wrote:

Good, free antivirus software is quickly becoming a rarity as more and mors smaller companies like Avast and AVG get gobbled up by large companies. I cannot recommend any good ones that won’t constantly bug you about buying something (looking at you Avast and AVG). Malwarebytes is well worth the $39 per year.

This is not really surprising because keeping even a second-string antivirus program current is not a cheap undertaking.  The nagging is, I think, the price one pays for “free”.

That said, top-grade security software is almost always on sale for pretty reasonable prices.  Yes, the price is only good for a year or two and renewals are going to be a good deal more expensive, but one can always buy a new subscription when the time comes rather than allowing the “old” one to renew.

Also, it never hurts to check with your ISP.  A number of them offer name-brand security suites as part of their service.  One may not like the brand offered but it is effectively free.

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oldfry

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Re your last point my ISP, TalkTalk, offered F-Secure Safe free for a year. I was so impressed I purchased it for the following year for £20+ which covered 5 devices, so my mobiles got covered as well as my 3 Windows installations.

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So true. We use the same first string security suite every year, typically as a new customer, through various money saving techniques. We save a bundle, so our cost is under $100 per year for multiple devices. We hate software subscriptions, which are good for companies, bad for those under cost constraints. Nags for fluffy borderline feature add-ons, free or paid, are ignored. So we end up with high security without any noticed performance impact.

Windows 10 22H2 desktops & laptops on Dell, HP, ASUS; No servers, no domain.

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For me I have found that just ignoring the nags and waiting until my A/V subscription is close to expiration results in significant savings.  For example, the routine nags for my Bitdefender “12 devices” subscription were $79.  Last minute, $48 same package.  I’m good with that and the POM.

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TechTango wrote:

For me I have found that just ignoring the nags and waiting until my A/V subscription is close to expiration results in significant savings.  For example, the routine nags for my Bitdefender “12 devices” subscription were $79.  Last minute, $48 same package.  I’m good with that and the POM.

Patience really IS a virtue.  And occasionally quite rewarding.  🙂

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