 | By Fred Langa This week, I’ll add to my previous comments on free and easy ways to eliminate what the Disk Cleanup tool in Windows leaves behind. You can quickly eliminate megabytes or even gigabytes of hard-to-remove junk and boost your system performance! |
‘Enhanced’ disk-cleanup settings not enough
In my Mar. 13, 2008, article, a reader asked me to update what he called my “classic” tuning and tweaking articles on Windows XP and previous versions. The reader was specifically interested in my updating those tips for Vista.
In my last column, I discussed enhanced disk cleaning: how to access and modify the settings of Windows’ built-in Disk Cleanup tool — cleanmgr.exe — to make the tool more thorough than its default settings allow.
But even the hidden, enhanced settings of Disk Cleanup leave junk behind. Windows, it seems, is conservative in eliminating files, preferring to waste some disk space rather than risk deleting a potentially important file.
That’s a sensible strategy in the short term, but over time Windows’ excessive caution leads to an enormous number of unnecessarily preserved junk files. These undeleted, unused, and unneeded files can consume prodigious amounts of space. Even worse, this can bog down your system’s performance — if you don’t attack the digital plaque.
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