They're out of order and incomplete, but I thought I'd start a new thread for cleaning up your HDD, recovering HDD space, and generally increasing Windows efficiency and returning your Windows XP or 2000 box to that 'Just before my retailer installed all this crap on it!' feeling...
1. Take a look under Start-->All Programs-->Startup and right-click & delete any unnecessary startup items like MS Office, Acrobat Speed Launcher, Reminders, etc. Don’t delete anything you actually do want to run at startup.
2. Go to Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Services and change the startup type of Security Center to manual. It’s pretty worthless, but don’t disable it in case you do want to run it someday.
3. Open My Computer. On the standard toolbar along the top click on ‘Tools’ then ‘Folder Options’ and select the ‘View’ tab. I generally think that all the ‘Display…’ options at the top should be selected. Make sure that ‘Show hidden files and folders’ is selected but it’s OK to leave ‘Hide protected operating system files’ checked.
4. Right-click on any empty spot on your desktop and select ‘Properties’. Click the ‘Desktop’ tab and then ‘Customize Desktop’ button. Take out the check to ‘Run Desktop Cleanup Every 60 Days’ because you know better when and how to clean up your desktop than Windows does. Put a check here for any of the four icons at the top that you want to appear on your desktop. Click ‘OK’ and then select the ‘Appearance’ tab and click on ‘Effects’. Turn on ‘Clear Type’ screen font smoothing, and I also recommend turning off ‘transition effects’ and ‘show window contents while dragging’; sure they’re a bit prettier, but turning them off with speed things up.
5. Browse to C:\Windows (or C:\WINNT) and change your ‘Views’ setting on the toolbar to Details. Now sort your files by filename. All those folders at the top that start & end with ‘$’ are uninstall information for Windows Updates & Patches that you are never going to uninstall. Highlight them all and shift-delete them. Look through your file list and highlight all the KBxxxxx.log files and Shift-Delete them. These are logs from when those updates were installed. Also find and delete anything with a .old or .tmp extension in this folder. Browse down to \Software Distribution\Downloads and delete everything in it. These are install files from Windows Updates & Patches that have already been installed. Back up a bit and go to the C:\Windows\Temp folder and shift-delete everything in it that it’ll let you. If the delete stops because a file is in use, just ctrl-click it to unselect it and try again. This might happen more than once.
6. Browse to C:\Documents and Settings\{Whatever your user profile name is}. You may have more than one profile and can repeat these steps for any that aren’t ‘Default User’, ‘All Users’, ‘LocalService’ or ‘NetworkService’. Browse down in each folder to \Local Settings\Temp and shift-delete everything in there that you can. Back up a level and go to \Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5 and shift-delete everything in it.
7. Right click on you’re My Computer icon and select properties, or go to the Control Panel and select ‘System’. Click on the ‘System Restore’ tab. There’s just no reason to be throwing away 12% of your HDD space for System Restore, so adjust the settings here to between 2 and 4Gb total for all your drives or partitions or maybe ~ 4%. Now click on the ‘Advanced’ tab and then ‘Error Reporting’. Turn off error reporting but leave ‘But notify me…’ checked – There’s just no need to be telling Microsoft that we had an error anymore. You may also want to check the ‘Performance’ settings and see what your swap file is set to. It should generally be about 2x system RAM memory minimum and 4x maximum.
8. Download and run Contig Defragmenter from Microsoft here:
http://download.sysinternals.com/Files/Contig.zip and run it from a command prompt like so: contig –q –s c:\*.*
9. (Optional but recommended) Download and run Amust Registry Cleaner from download.com here:
http://www.download.com/Amust-Registry-Cleaner/3000-2094_4-10543038.html?tag=lst-0-1 and tell it to schedule a registry compact for the next reboot. It’s a 30-day free trial, so you may as well either buy or uninstall it after you’re done.
10. (Optional) For windows XP users, download and install the SuperFetch.reg here:
http://69.249.191.186/Temp/superfetch.reg to enable the expanded pre-fetch caching.
11. Do you use the hibernation feature? If not, go turn it off in Control Panel, Power Settings. It can often take up several hundred MBs of HDD space.
12. Download and run Absolute StartUp here:
http://www.absolutestartup.com/ and clean up any other unnecessary programs that are running at startup.
Topic: Where did all my HDD space go?!? Or, Windows XP Cleanup & Tweaks... (Read 1157 times)