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Clean the Crud From Your PC

Over­time your PC slows down. Or it is already slow­ing down. Slow start­ing up or shut­ting down. Appli­ca­tions take long time to open. Even some­times you hear the hard drive mak­ing noises. Despite hav­ing the lat­est Win­dows with all update fixes, con­stant crud induc­ing habits such as installing and unin­stalling of pro­grams can make your PC sluggish.

I am in this arti­cle going to talk about how to clean it up with­out hav­ing to refor­mat your hard disk or rein­stall Win­dows or doing any­thing to over­haul it from the scratch. But sim­ple fixes that takes the crud out of your com­puter and pre­vent those clut­ter­ing habits here on.

Why PC slows down? Pos­si­ble Hard­ware issues and fixes.

Over heat­ing of processor:

Prob­lem

Solu­tion

Cooler fans that’s mounted on proces­sor gets dust and slows down. This heats up the proces­sor. Upon reach­ing cer­tain tem­per­a­ture set in the BIOS, the sys­tem slows down.

To fix this, make sure the fan is clean. Take your lap­top or ter­mi­nal to ser­vice cen­ter, and ask them to clean up all the dust. You can do this your­self if you have pre­vi­ously opened your ter­mi­nal or laptop.

Hard drive fail­ures from bad sectors:

Prob­lem

Solu­tion

Over time, hard disk starts to develop bad sec­tors  (Sec­tors are small data units on hard disk), from fre­quent data usage. In that case the new data are auto­mat­i­cally copied to free or good sec­tors. But this
wont hap­pen exactly as is, the data might end up on bad sec­tors result­ing in the fail­ure of that data. As the drive starts to fail, this would then hap­pen often.

To fix this, turn on SMART fea­tures in the BIOS  to let the SMART diag­nose alert the fail­ure immediately.

In addi­tion to that, bench­mark tools such as Fresh Diag­nose or Aida64 (pre­vi­ously known as Ever­est) helps to run results of your sys­tem hard­ware and know its cur­rent sta­tus to eas­ily deter­mine whether to carry on with it or buy a new one.

Why Win­dows slows down with use? Track­ing down and clean­ing out the crud.

Mov­ing on to Win­dows itself now. There are three main causes that stems with the long time usage of Win­dows. Those are Clut­tered up Win­dows Reg­istry, mul­ti­ple copies of pro­gram asso­ci­ated library files, back ground ser­vices and tasks, and frag­mented hard drive. As you install and unin­stall more pro­grams, the Reg­istry gets bal­looned up, as well as cre­at­ing a lot of junk and asso­ci­ated library files, such as the DLL files and as well as mak­ing the hard disk more frag­mented. Now lets talk about these issues one by one.

Win­dows Registry:

Prob­lem

Solu­tion

Win­dows reg­istry is a data­base where win­dows stores appli­ca­tion install and con­fig­u­ra­tion set­tings, hard­ware set­tings etc… Installing and unin­stalling pro­gram, over­time can bal­loon up the size of reg­istry. The size of it is about more than a quar­ter of my mem­ory on my PC here, which is about 425 MB of reg­istry data­base itself.

Larger appli­ca­tion like Anti Virus, Video Play­ers stores its data on mul­ti­ple loca­tion in the Reg­istry. Added to that, incom­plete unin­stal­la­tion never totally clean sweep the reg­istry off its obso­lete data.

This makes retriev­ing the needed data from the reg­istry harder, as a result appli­ca­tion takes long time to load.

To fix this, as opposed to what other com­puter pro­fes­sion­als believe in, I tend use reg­istry cleaner and it works pretty well for me. Win­dows reg­istry is a com­pli­cated data­base, but that doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily mean  com­puter vision or Arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence can­not put the main­te­nance of reg­istry on automa­tion to atleast some extent.

An auto­mated reg­istry main­te­nance involves, com­plete backup of entire Win­dows reg­istry and asso­ciate a sys­tem restore point, before per­form­ing its oper­a­tion on it. It can clear up obso­lete entries left by unin­stal­la­tion of pro­grams, dupli­cated and invalid entries with ease. This ensure clear­ing up of atleast 50–150 MB. In addi­tion to that it can defrag­ment Reg­istry Hives (the parts of registry).

Junk back­ground ser­vices and task :

Prob­lem

Solu­tion

Installing pro­grams often also adds more to the back­ground ser­vices. You can check how many back­ground ser­vices that are run­ning by going to Start > Run > services.msc and take a look at a list of ser­vices that are Enabled.

In addi­tion to back­ground ser­vices, also the ones that run dur­ing sys­tem start up in the memory.

This can be a prob­lem when that par­tic­u­lar pro­gram takes more mem­ory or CPU.

You can check the sys­tem start up list by going to Start > Run > mscon­fig.

To fix this, Soluto can help you with the community-driven data. Soluto lets you turn off unwanted start up pro­grams and back­ground win­dows ser­vices and speeds up boot time.

Also you could go to taskman­ager (Start > Run > taskmgr) or Win­dows Resource Mon­i­tor (Start > Run > resmon) and mon­i­tor the cpu and mem­ory usage. Shut­down the pro­gram that is not cur­rently nec­es­sary. I per­son­ally use Process Explorer which shows processes in a tree view and has a lot of options.

You could as well defrag­ment page file or the vir­tual mem­ory with PageDe­frag. This enables quick access of data in page file and hence a lit­tle faster system.

Frag­mented Hard disk:

Prob­lem

Solu­tion

Over the time with cre­ation and dele­tion of files and pro­grams, the hard disk becomes frag­mented. When the hard disk is almost full that swap­ping mem­ory on to it (for page file or vir­tual mem­ory) becomes an issue, the sys­tem slows down.

To fix this, run disk clean up tool, by going to Start, All Pro­grams, Acces­sories, Sys­tem Tools, Disk Cleanup. Make sure you only delete the tem­po­rary files, and not the sys­tem restore point or shadow copy files. Also don’t com­press unused sys­tem files.

Defrag­ment frag­mented hard disk. Run this when you don’t need much sys­tem use, as defrag­ment­ing will keep your sys­tem busy and hence slow.

Now that you have seen how easy it is to clear out the crud from your PC, lets talk about how to pre­vent it from hap­pen­ing again, and totally avoid refor­mat­ting hard disk or rein­stalling win­dows to get back that new PC again.

Steps to main­tain­ing a clean PC.

When installing a new pro­gram, see if the appli­ca­tion has an advanced option. Make sure to use it. You could set the loca­tion to install, choose what com­po­nents and extra util­i­ties to install, and as well turn off run­ning at sys­tem startup or quick launch setup if you don’t want.
Use Soluto with mscon­fig and services.msc to turn off unwanted back­ground ser­vices and pro­gram run­ning on mem­ory at sys­tem start up.
Use disk cleanup tool to clean tem­po­rary inter­net and instal­la­tion files.
Auto sched­ule disk defrag­ment to run once a week.
Make sure to not install any browser addons as that might install mal­wares and crudwares.
Defrag Reg­istry and clean it up with a reg­istry cleaner tool

 

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