I am sure that most of you have heard of Temporary Internet Files and Fragmented Files and all of those things that tend to eat up your computer’s hard drive space and your computers overall performance. If you haven’t well now is the time to learn about them, two well-established programs that have been around for quite some time are now two of the most important applications inside my toolbox, and they should definitely be inside yours.
Luckily they are both created by the same company, Piriform, which has been helping us with our problems since about 2005. They are a new company who states that their team is “is a combination of late-working, highly-skilled staff and a heavy dose of caffeine! Together we design, create and maintain the software.” - Basically, it’s the type of company that every up and coming programmer want’s to work for and be a part of.
CCleaner v2.27
CCleaner screenshot after a scan completed
Temporary files can take up more space on your computer than you think, and in return these temporary files might be scanned every single time a certain program or application is loaded, or even every time you turn on your computer! Now I am sure you don’t want that type of thing to happen so it would probably be best to check out this software, it can check just about everywhere in your computer for temporary files, and it only takes a few minutes! After which it tells you all the files it deleted and how much space was being taken up by these temporary files. I like it mainly because Windows 7 tends to keep a lot of files in it’s “Temporary Files” section, in the case on the right there were 3,118 files taking up alomst 2Gigs of data in stored under “System – Temporary Files”. So I like to think that is a pretty good example of where problems might come from.
The computer I am referencing for this application was already relatively quick, 4.00GB of ram, fast processor running at around 2.8Ghz, so if your computer is running extremely slow temporary files might be one of the problems (sorry for being a bit repetitive..). CCleaner also has a simple registry cleaner which works flawlessly and allows you to create a backup of the registry before doing anything too crazy. It just cleans up certain things in your registry that aren’t necessary for whatever reason it can think of, such as after an application has been uninstalled or maybe was part of some spy ware that was left behind from weeks or months or years ago.
All in all it’s definitely worth it, small download, quick install, and no bloat ware installed with it (make sure you choose to not install the Yahoo! toolbar that comes along with it, unless your into that kind of stuff, I guess)
Defraggler v1.1.5
Defraggler screenshot after analysing a relative clean computer.
After running the temporary file removing proffesional CCleaner, your next best bet is to Defragment your harddrive. Lot’s of times the normal, boring, Windows Defragmenter works just fine, but other times you just want to get rid of the simple Windows solution and use a third-party application that runs simply on donations. Piriform’s Defraggler is your best bet, and I’d put $50 on Defraggler if we were playing roulette. Defraggler shows you which files it is working on, and even has a very simple and quick to setup scheduler that runs in the background and you will never even know it is working.
From Wikipedia, “Fragmentation occurs when the operating system cannot or will not allocate enough contiguous space to store a complete file as a unit, but instead puts parts of it in gaps between other files (usually those gaps exist because they formerly held a file that the operating system has subsequently deleted or because the operating system allocated excess space for the file in the first place). Larger files and greater numbers of files also contribute to fragmentation and consequent performance loss. Defragmentation attempts to alleviate these problems.”
Basically what that is saying is that if there isn’t enough physical space on the hard drive for a file to be placed, it will be split up across the hard drive and placed where ever happens to be the best place the hard drive thinks it will fall into place, its a veritable form of Tetris, using your information instead of colorful shapes.
Defraggler moves these files closer to one another, phyically, on the hard drive so that when they are accessed they are loaded faster and without many skips during access time, the scheduler is great in this case because it keeps your files all as close together, again physically, as possible; it also keeps you running smooth without you having to worry about a thing!
So what do you use? For a while I was using “Ultimate Defrag”, but that is nothing compared to the visually clean Defraggler. I can’t find anything better than these “pear shaped” goodies for a “pear shaped” company.
