The power of elbow grease
Why fixing problems as you go, and monitoring what your PC is doing, can be better than a full operating system reinstall.
Before taking drastic action and shipping your PC off to military school, you should really do everything you possibly can to fix the problems you’ve got, and find out the cause of its misbehaviour, because you might just find that a simple solution works better.
Many people look at a Windows reinstallation as a way to fix any and all ills. However, we consider it as being more of a last resort. It’s a little like dealing with unruly children. Before taking drastic action and shipping your PC off to military school, you should really do everything you possibly can to fix the problems you’ve got, and find out the cause of its misbehaviour, because you might just find that a simple solution works better. Heavy-handed metaphor aside, keeping a keen eye on your PC’s actions isn’t particularly difficult, because Windows 10 includes all the tools you might need at your disposal: There’s the Task Manager (which you can pull up at any time with a quick Ctrl-Shift-Esc); there’s Resource Monitor (type “resmon” into the search bar) for a more detailed report on what’s doing what; and there’s even the difficult-to-grok but absolutely useful Event Viewer, which can throw up some worrying but utterly benign messages, but also reveal the true cause of system crashes or slowdowns.
Clean living
It is worth keeping your system clean, not in terms of hard drive space
(unless you’re critically full, in which case, you should definitely start scrubbing), but in terms of the number of things that are installed on your system, how up to date they are, and how many of them you allow to just run whenever they like and eat up your system resources in the process. In terms of the latter, the Task Manager startup tab can give you some clues, not just about those auto-running apps, but also about the impact they tend to have on your startup process, and you can also use it to disable their automatic execution. If you want to get more involved with what happens at startup, Autoruns ( https://download. sysinternals.com/files/Autoruns.zip) gives you much more granular and deep control, although you should treat it with kid gloves, because heavy-handed tinkering could potentially cause more problems than it solves.
So, what’s the best way to deal with old, unwanted apps? To completely expunge them from your system, of
course. There’s nothing wrong with Windows’ built-in uninstallation procedures. You can flit through your Start menu, right-clicking things that shouldn’t be there, and using the Uninstall option to get rid of them. Or you could use the Apps & Features tool, accessible from Windows’ settings panel, which (sometimes) offers up a bit more detailed information about when a program was installed, and when you last deemed it important enough to run.
That usually works just fine. But if you’d like some more reassurance that a troublesome app is really gone, and with it any trace of its existence (we’re well aware that revenge is usually a big contributor to any uninstallation process), something like the free version of IoBit Uninstaller 8 ( www.iobit.com) can work wonders. It makes software removal quick and straightforward, and it hunts for absolutely every file associated with the app that’s on death row.
We wouldn’t opt for the paid-for Pro version, even though it adds extra tools for stripping away manufacturer bloatware, because apps such as PC Decrapifier ( www. pcdecrapifier.com) do the job just fine without any outlay. It might be tempting to try out CCleaner ( www. ccleaner.com), too, given that it can even get rid of Microsoft’s default apps, and we’re not going to stop you – but it’s worth pointing out that CCleaner can be very annoying in terms of notifications. If we do use it, it’s generally immediately removed once the task is complete.