This is a quick-n-dirty primer on helping your system run a little better. The techniques I'll describe here are some of the ones I use when PCs are running more slowly than they should, or are crashing frequently. These techniques aren't the only things that can be done, but they're the most fundamental. This isn't performance tweaking, which is more advanced; it's routine preventive maintenance that should be part of every PC user's habitual practice. Doing these things regularly, say at least monthly, will help make life with your PC a bit less annoying.
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In a nutshell, your PC routinely creates files that either are unnecessary, or are only necessary for a brief time, after which they no longer have a reason to live. I'll tell you a few types that should be routinely deleted. We're not going to skate too close to the edge here; after all, if I told you all my secrets, I'd put myself out of business.
First, whenever you run ScanDisk it can create .CHK files that contain whatever it tried to salvage from sectors of your hard disk on which it found problems. The original idea was that we should examine these files in Notepad to see if they contained any useful text, which we could then cut-and-paste back into some document. In real life, this stuff is mostly chunks of temporary files, which should have been cleanly and invisibly deleted when the program that created them exited. They're usually caused by crashing Windows while an application has some open files. Get to these by double-clicking on the My Computer icon on your desktop, then double-clicking the C: drive icon. You'll see these (if they exist) in the root directory of whatever disk they're on (for instance C:\). Kill 'em all.
Next, the contents of the C:\Windows\Temp folder is intended to be deleted "automagically," whenever a program like Word or Excel exits. When running, these applications create little "scratchpad" files, and there's no reason for them to exist after the programs close. Also, many installation programs will put their setup files in this folder, and then neglect to delete them when the install finishes. Again, navigate here through the My Computer icon, or by using Windows Explorer (Start, Programs, Windows Explorer). Kill 'em all.
A third category is temporary internet files used by Internet Explorer or another browser. In this example, I'll ignore the others, because they're losers. ;^) To get here, right-click on the Internet Explorer icon on your desktop, then click on Properties. Click the Delete files... button, then click the OK button.
When we finish deleting everything we want to get rid of, it's important to actually remove the dead files from the hard disk by emptying the Recycle Bin. Until we do that, the files are still there, they're merely inaccessible. Not until the files are actually gone from the drive do we truly recover the space they were using.
ScanDisk is one of the utilities that comes with Windows 95 and above. It finds a few of the glitches that Windows can run into when it isn't 100% successful in writing files onto the hard disk. As mentioned, it creates .CHK files when it finds problems, so remember to check for and delete any after you run this program.
Notice on our second ScanDisk illustration that I've checked the box that says Automatically fix errors. When I run ScanDisk, I usually uncheck this box, because I usually want to see what the errors are (if any). But for non-nerds, it's OK to just let it blast away, then clean up any .CHK files manually later on. The first time you run ScanDisk, you should probably click the Thorough radio button, to make ScanDisk actually test every sector of your hard disk for read-write errors. If you don't do that, it merely checks the files. That's OK most of the time, but Thorough should be used both initially, and whenever you suspect that the hard disk itself may be having problems. It takes a lot longer, maybe half an hour to an hour or more, so don't make it the default setting.
Disk Defragmenter (which I'll refer to from now as Defrag) is another of Windows' built-in utilities. It corrects a problem that's caused by the way Windows stores files on a disk. Basically, files are usually broken up into various-sized chunks and splattered all over a hard disk. I'm sure there was a very good technical reason for them to do it this way (ha!), but over time, as Windows needs to search for all the pieces of its files whenever it tries to load anything, it just gets slower and slower. Defragmenting a disk puts all the pieces of each file next to all the other pieces, and packs all the files together at the front of the disk. This makes Windows' job a little easier whenever it tries to open a file. Of course, Windows is always writing files to the disk again, so this process needs to be repeated regularly.
Whenever you start Defrag, you first have to tell it which drive or drives to defragment. If you have more than one hard disk on a PC, there's an "All Hard Disks" choice.
In Windows 98, they "improved" Defrag by making it move files around on the hard disk, in an effort to put the most important ones near the front of the disk, where they would load more quickly. For this miniscule improvement, we get a Defrag that takes many hours to run every time. Not worth it, for my money; uncheck the box to turn it off.
When Defrag is running, its default display is just this little window. This might lead you to believe that Defrag is just a minor task that can run in the background while you keep on working in the foreground. Don't believe it. Every time any program, or Windows itself, writes anything to the disk, Defrag starts over. Don't kid yourself; let Defrag run by itself and go to lunch.
That's why I usually click the Show Details button. We get this entertaining and informative display, and it looks like our PC is really doing some whizzy nerd thing, while we put our feet up on the desk and read a magazine. When our boss looks in, we glance at him, nod wisely, jerk our head at the monitor, and say "Defragging!" He goes away impressed.
Startup Manager is our little exception, in that it isn't part of Windows, and doesn't come from Microsoft. It's a free utility that you can download from various places on the web, including my little site. The program's purpose is to give us control over another major source of crashes and system slowdowns: too much junk loading at startup time. Startup Manager lets us toggle each item on and off (rebooting to activate the changes). As the illustration from my work PC shows, I've deactivated some of the programs that would normally have loaded every time I boot. If I change, my mind, I can simply reactivate them.
You can download Startup Manager from the link in the previous paragraph, or search for it elsewhere on the web. It installs easily in about a minute, and it's fine to just use all the default choices. It can then be run any time by clicking Start, Programs, Startup Manager, Startup Manager.
If you do these things somewhere between weekly and monthly, your PC will give you less trouble. If you run into things that are beyond the ability of these basic techniques to correct or avoid, shoot me an email at peter.a.moore@usa.net and let me know.
Pete Moore
IT Engineer / Precision IT
peter.a.moore@usa.net
PMoore@PrecisionIT.net
www.peteranthonymoore.com