The Hard Drive
One reason for performance degradation is that the hard drive can become littered with old program fragments. You may need to get rid of this trash. Unfortunately, cleaning your drive hasn’t been straightforward since DOS.

The first step is removing programs you no longer require. Using Add/Remove Programs is the safest method, but not always most effective. Many program “parts” get left behind (i.e., program folders, registry entries, and DLLs (dynamic link libraries)) after everything’s been “deleted.”

Many applications leave folders behind. In most cases, this allows recovery of data and settings if you reinstall or upgrade the deleted application. You can locate most of these folders inside Program Files folder using Windows Explorer. Compare this list with items in Add/Remove Programs. If you’re sure you don’t need these folders, you may delete them.

During normal use, files are created when you perform a certain task. Once the task is finished, these files may remain. For instance, Microsoft Word creates .TMP files while you’re working on a document. Once your document’s saved, these files are useless. Another file type that can be deleted is .GID. These are generated when you search a Help file and are regenerated when additional searches are conducted. All of these files may be safely deleted.

You can use Search to find these file types. Locate all files with .TMP and .GID extensions. Do this with a wildcard (*) search (i.e., search for *.TMP files and then *.GID files).

Once you’ve finished deleting files, empty the Recycle Bin and reclaim the free space by running Windows defragmenter. This is necessary because deleting files does not actually remove their data from the hard drive immediately. It simply erases the entry from the File Allocation Table (FAT), or the directory that describes where files are located on the disk. The space is not actually reused until new files are written to the drive.

Once unnecessary applications and files are removed, there are several other areas in Windows that need attention.

The Registry
When software’s installed, configuration and other entries are made in the Registry. Unfortunately, when software is removed, the Registry entries are not always deleted. An example of this might be noting that a program that’s been removed still appears in Add/Remove Programs. Items that are left behind must be removed manually. You can use a registry editor (i.e., regedit or regedt32) or a third-party application. If you’ve ever looked in the Registry, you know that it’s a complicated mess. Entire books are dedicated to its contents. Unless you know what you’re doing, I don’t recommend directly editing the Registry. One of the most commonly used third-party tools for cleaning the Registry is Symantec’s Norton Utilities—though you can find others by searching the Internet.

Spyware
If you install shareware and freeware, or use P2P (peer-to-peer) file sharing, you’ve probably installed spyware and adware, as well. This was the topic of last month’s article. As mentioned, this software runs a number of processes on your machine and can rapidly chew up bandwidth and performance. Get rid of it!

Internet Explorer
Look at the files and information stored in Internet Explorer (IE).

First, address temporary Internet file management. Do this by determining how much disk space is being used. These temporary files can speed browsing, but can use a lot of hard drive space. You can safely delete all these files.

Next, manage your Internet cookies. These are files that are maintained on your machine. They keep track of certain actions that you perform on remote websites. Cookies are located on your system partition (generally the C: drive) in the Documents and Settings\USER\Cookies folder. You can browse this folder and delete cookies you don’t need.

Finally, from inside the browser, you can clear your History to remove information it has stored.

E-mail
The last place we’ll go for system cleaning is your e-mail folders. Continuously storing old and useless e-mail will clutter your system’s hard drive as well. On top of that, excessive e-mail storage will slow your system’s response time. Your e-mail program will take longer to launch and display your messages. It will also take longer for you to create new messages.

The simplest way to clean up your e-mail is to manage your messages. Go into your saved folders and sort your messages. One way to do this is “by date.” The oldest items are easiest to get rid of, as they’ve normally no longer require your attention. Make certain you are not storing SPAM (unsolicited commercial e-mail) and not keeping an excessive number of Deleted Items in your trash bin. It also makes sense to occasionally delete your old Sent Items, as these take up space on your hard drive as well.

Conclusion
Doing these simple tasks can take you a long way in returning your system to its previous levels of high performance.

Until next time…