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Hey Fuzzlepup, its my turn to rant, this is a simple and basic windows XP maintenance manual, and Mods, please leave this here or even sticky it, it does not belong it tech, no one who needs it would see it there.
Over the last few days I’ve gotten stuck doing tech support over chat with a few of my friends and I’m getting really pissed at Microsoft from it. I realize they chose to build these problems into the system in order to try to encourage upgrades.
As I go through this mess I will try to remember to document why this part is here and what it does, and why we want to do what we’re doing.
First thing we need to do is make sure that the files and folders we want to work with are visible, so we want to go to “My Computer” then select “Folder Properties” on the “Tools” menu. Once the new window is open we select the second tab and scroll down till you see “Show hidden files and folders”, make sure this option is marked then move down a little farther and unmark “Hide protected operating system files” then hit “OK” to exit this window.
Our second objective will be the 2 temp files in Windows XP or 2000, and most likely Vista as well. These folders are used to store data that we use only for a few moments before its suppose to be deleted. These are the places where the install programs decompress they’re files to before doing the software install. Most install programs don’t bother to delete they’re files from here, which, given enough time, can really hurt your systems performance. So we need to manually clear this mess out ourselves, we’ll start this section by going to “C:\windows\temp” and deleting everything in here. Now don’t get scared if it tells you something is in use and can’t be deleted, that’s normal for some files. These include any file starting with a “~” this means that windows is using that file, anything that is not in use, we can delete. This folder is here to offer backward compatibility with old programs that don’t understand the new folder’s location. Windows 95, 98, ME users can go to the next target. The new folder is located at “C:\ Documents and Settings\” your user name here “Local Settings\temp” this is just like the older folder, so treat it the same way. BTW, do not delete these folders, only there contents.
Now on to the third target, we want to attack yet another annoying windows folder located at “C:\windows\prefetch”, this folder is a place where windows stores a copy of the way a file is loaded into your ram, thus allowing it to load the program as ram, not a program. This is suppose to be faster than loading the program, however this folder gets congested and need to be manually cleaned as well, like the temp folder, we can delete everything in here, with reckless abandon, because windows will just rebuild it as it needs to, as long as you don’t delete the folder, you can’t hurt anything.
Our fourth target is going to be at “C:\windows” in this folder we want to delete any folder that starts with a “$”. These folders are back up copies that were created when you installed updates. We do not uninstall updates, so these back ups are pointless waists of space, let’s get it back now.
The fifth enemy is Internet Explorer, so lets go defeat this boss too. Go to “My Computer” and then enter the “Control Panel” and then find “Internet Options” once inside we have a slight divergence of paths. IE 6 and IE 7 have slightly different screens here.
For IE 6 users on the first tab we have 3 buttons to press “Delete Cookies”, “Delete Files” (check the delete all offline files box) and “Clear History”, then close the window. The reason we do this is cookies are temp files for web pages, they contain lots of stuff that can be annoying, but also have things like, storing your log in to the forums and such too, so you’ll have to log back in afterwards. History is a list of sites that you’ve looked at, this is how IE knows to change the color of links that you’ve already followed and those you haven’t, this gets long, and slows down your computer with time. The final part of this section is the files we deleted, these files are the pictures you see on the net, as well as java scripts and the actual pages that you look at, we want to clean these out to get back space, and also to keep them from slowing down the computer because it has to dig thru that mess looking for an old version before its aloud to download a new one.
IE 7 users I’ll add your section later, I don’t have it installed at home
At this point you should empty your “Recycle Bin” this may take a while, so be patient, your compy is getting healthier.
Ok, now we move on to the sixth stage of our game, and it’s a long boring one too, by default, windows writes files to your hard drive in little pieces, and in such a way that 1 file can actually be in hundreds of pieces if its big enough, when we access the file windows tacks down all the pieces and pull them up, this is time consuming and so we want to stop that, so lets make windows put them in one piece for us. This process is called defraging, we do this by using a special program, I prefer the more advanced Raxco Perfect disk for this, however you have a simple to use, free program already on your hard disk already, so we’ll use it for now. We get to it by going into “My Computer” and right clicking our hard drive and selecting properties. We’ll then select the “Tools” tab, and there we see a button marked defrag, just click it, and let it run, this will probably take quite a while to run. The reason I use the more expensive defrag program is that it allows me to move files that I use a lot to the faster sections of my hard drive, it also allows me to defrag files that the windows defrager isn’t allowed to touch.
When this all said and done your compy should be run a lot better after a nice reboot, I’ll rant later about tweaking the windows to get better performance from the system too, stuff that should be defaults but aren’t.
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