Spring Cleaning Your PC by Jason Levine

Think your computer is clean now? Not quite, but you're getting closer. As you browse through the web, websites are constantly writing cookies to your hard drive. While they're mostly harmless, there's no real reason why you should keep 99% of the cookies on your hard drive. That other one percent of the cookies store usernames, passwords, and other sites that you visit often (and thus most likely want to keep). There are many programs available to help you manage your cookies, but I'd recommend Cookie Jar. Of course, I might be biased -- I wrote it.

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When you first install and run Cookie Jar, all of the cookies on your hard drive will be listed in the "Undecided" Jar. Go through them deleting the ones you don't want and moving the ones you want to the "Allowed" Jar. Deleting a cookie is easy, just highlight the listing and press the delete key. Soon your hard drive will be cleaned of all cookies, except for the ones you decided to keep.

Just like Cookies can accumulate from browsing Web Sites, your registry can accumulate needless entries from software installs and uninstalls. Microsoft's RegClean 4.1a can help clean out those entries. When you run RegClean, it will automatically scan your registry for unneeded entries. The deleted registry keys are backed up into a file that you can merge back into your registry in case problems arise.

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As files are read from and written to your hard drive, small chunks of files can become scattered across the drive. There's little chance that the hard drive will lose the chunks, but it can slow down your system. That's why it's a good idea to defragment your hard drives every month. Luckily, Windows comes with a defragmentation tool built-in. Open up My Computer, right-click one of your hard drives, and select Properties. Click on Tools and then on "Defragment Now." This process can take awhile depending on the size of your hard drive, so you might want to leave it overnight.

Once the defragmentation is complete, your system is finally clean. However, now that your PC is clean, you might want to consider making a backup of your system. This way should something happen to your computer; you can restore your data quickly and easily. For more instructions on backing up your system, I'd recommend reading Fred Langa's "Fast, Easy Backups for Win98/ME/NT/2K/XP" article.

As a final recommendation, I'd suggest not making spring-cleaning your PC a once-a-year job. Instead, I'd recommend cleaning it out once every other month. If you do so, the cleaning will proceed quicker and your system will run better.

Thanks to Serdar Yegulalp, the folks at PCQandA, and the DSLReports Security forum in their help during my research for this article.