Clean Up Week: Scan for Junk

Your computer creates a lot of files on a daily basis.  Many of these are temporary files that are meant to be created for a specific purpose and then deleted.  In most cases, these files are deleted, but events sometimes result in these files being left on your computer.

Installing programs can also create entries in your registry that are unnecessary once you decide to uninstall the program.  Even if you used yesterday's tip and scanned your registry for leftovers after you uninstalled a program, there may still be unnecessary entries left over that Revo Uninstaller did not catch.

CCleaner will scan for both types of junk.  Download and install CCleaner, and then run it.  On the left-hand side, you will see options for "Cleaner" and "Registry".  The cleaner will scan for temporary files and a variety of other items that might be taking up space on your computer.  You can control what it searches for by selecting or deselecting the checkboxes.  Click the Analyze button and let it scan and determine what it can find.  Then click the Run Cleaner button to clear it all out.  When I ran this on my computer this week, it found 4 GB of unnecessary information to clear (that's a lot!).

You can also have it scan the registry for errors or unnecessary entries.  Click on the registry button on the left-hand side.  Then select "Scan for Issues".  After the scan, select "Fix selected issues..." to fix what it finds.  If will first ask you if you want to back up your registry, ALWAYS do this! One bad edit to the registry can severely damage your computer, so you want to have a backup in place in case something goes wrong.  (I have used this program on to clean many computers and never had any problem, but it never hurts to be cautious!)  Then, you can see the suggested edits one-by-one or simply have it fix all of them.  Once you have cleaned it, go back through the process again (I normally skip the registry backups on successive scans) until it tells you that it found no issues.  In many cases, clearing one entry will make a dependent entry unnecessary, too.

Tomorrow, we will look at another useful feature of CCleaner.