Spring Cleaning, Meet Mr. Fudge
Mar 30th, 2008 by Alex
I’ve been in the mood to bake the last couple days, but haven’t gotten around to it. So today — federal return completed and furnace filters changed — I decided to make a batch of fudge brownies. Topped with semi-sweet chocolate chips, they made the entire house smell amazing. And they taste pretty good too.
I like brownies.
While I was waiting for the brownies to be done I opted to take a minute minutes to clean up my computer and apply some necessary updates. Windows computers end up bloated over time. It’s a fact of life. There was only 1.2GB of free disk space which doesn’t leave much space for downloading ISOs. There wasn’t a lot of big stuff for me to remove, but there were some programs that I haven’t been using. I removed GFI LANguard Network Security Scanner and Morphon XML Editor since I never used them more than once or twice a few years back. I really liked Google SketchUp but lacked the skills to create decent looking models. While Hamachi is a pretty cool VPN application, I had security concerns with it. I haven’t used RealVNC in years and I was tired of having to shut it down when the laptop rebooted. I did install Pidgin. It was time, I’d been running Gaim 1.2.1 forever. Also setup Google Talk within it so I don’t need to keep Firefox open if I’m just chatting with someone. All of that only freed up 100MB or so, but it’s less clutter than before.
I’ve got a pre-dinner date with my financial advisor (so to speak) to go over my federal return. Once that’s done I’ll be able to take care of my Maryland return in short order. I’m one of the few technical guys I know that still does a paper return. I just prefer it. I like the tangible nature of it. I have to get to the library to pick up a copy of the instructions. I could download them and print them out, but why waste the paper and ink when the state has already printed out a zillion copies?
I’ll feel pretty good when tax season is over.
A few tips to help out with reclaiming the space on your machine:
1) Remove SP2 uninstall. I’m assuming you’re running XP SP2. If so you’ve probably been for quite some time and there is no need to ever have to uninstall it. Go into your Windows directory and find the blue colored directory that is the uninstall directory for it and delete it. Then go into Add/Remove programs and try to uninstall it. It will say that an error occurred (b/c we removed the uninstall files) and ask if you would like to remove it from the list, to which we will answer “Yes”.
2) Cleanup the temp files within your profile. The majority if temp files never get cleaned up, it still baffles me as to why software and OS’s have not implemented a better solution. Anyway, 99% of the time you can blow away everything inside “\Documents and Settings\\Local Settings\Temp”
3) Remove auto downloaded installations. Some programs start one of those web installers or a small couple kilobyte installer that then goes and fetches the “real stuff”. Some of it is stored in “\WINDOWS\Downloaded Installations”. Usually those are safe to delete.
4) Browser cache. Another thing I don’t understand why we still have in today’s broadband error, but if you have your browser cache enabled, clean that up.
5) For any of the programs you’ve uninstalled, check inside “\Program Files” and “\Documents and Settings\\Application Data” for left over stuff. Many times even though you uninstall and app it leaves butt loads of files or logs around.
I know most of these you’ve probably already done, but most people don’t know about 1 and 2 sometimes and they can have a big impact.
I prefer to use SequoiaView for hard drive cleanups. If you look at the little screenshot, it scans your filesystem and displays the contents as blocks. The blocks are all relatively sized to fill the window; bigger files result in bigger blocks. Makes it rather fast to pick out what the offending files/folders are.
DJ: I take a good amount of time cleaning out my profile on my work machine, but rarely the personal one. 920MB work of uninstall files, 49MB in temp files, 250KB (eh) in auto-downloaded junk, 200MB+ of IE cache (despite clear settings to the contrary)… all told, from 1.27GB free to 2.04GB. I’ll take it.
mokiejovis: It looks shiny, will have to check it out.