 |  | clean up your PC |  | | By Kevin Savetz | | (6/3/02) |
Spring has sprung and you've upended your house in a cleaning frenzy. Furniture moved, rugs shaken out, and you even dusted your PC case and monitor. But have you paid any attention to its hard drive?
As you download, install, and use software, your hard drive invariably becomes littered with junk: temporary files, zero-byte files, log files, duplicate files, and other data that just takes up space and reduces performance.
For help finding and removing that space-wasting information, use a clean-up application. Well look at how to use two utilities, Fast Cleaner and Check Identical Files, to sweep the cobwebs from your hard drive.
Take out the trash
Fast Cleaner clears many types of extraneous files from your PC. The program is $15 shareware with a 30-day free trial.
When you start Fast Cleaner, you'll see a simple start window. Press the Search button and wait a few moments while the program peruses the contents of your hard drive. When it is done, Fast Cleaner will report the number and total size of the junk files it has found. You can press the Clean button to quickly remove them. By default, those files will be moved to the Recycling Bin, but power users who want more control over the process should press the Details button instead.
Doing so will reveal a list of files that Fast Cleaner suspects aren't worth the bits theyre printed on. Scroll down the list to see the names and sizes of each file; you'll notice everything from zero-byte files to multi-megabyte temporary and log files. To remove a file, you can either right-click its name and choose Clean the Selected, or click the file and press the Delete button on your keyboard.
If you're not sure the file is worthless, there are several functions to help you decide. Right-click the file and choose View the Selected to see the files contents in Notepad, or choose Explore the Selected to see it in Windows Explorer. Choose Properties to open the file's Properties window, which shows when the file was created, modified, and last accessed.
You'll notice a check box to the left of each filename. These let you select multiple files and remove groups of them at once. By default, all of the boxes are checked. As you explore the list of suspect files, uncheck the boxes for any files you want to keep. When you're done, choose "Clean up all checked" from the Actions menu to remove the selected files.
Kevin Savetz, a frequent contributor to CNET Download.com, has been a freelance computer technology writer for 10 years.
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