Clear out the junk, streamline your OS, and slash unwanted system services
Clear out the junk, streamline your OS, and slash unwanted system services
YOUR PC IS A TRAVESTY. It’s a mess, and you know it. Files everywhere. Stray registry keys cluttering things up like dust bunnies in the corner of your garage. Unused programs filling your virtual shelves. Hidden auto-running programs under your Desktop’s rug. And that’s normal, because you’re a PC user.
That means you use your PC. In the process, you install things, you juggle files, you toss stuff on the desktop. Sometimes you need to move quickly and messily, sometimes you just can’t be bothered. Rest assured, you are doing the right thing. If you spent minutes in meticulous thought every time you had to decide where to save an image or install a piece of software, you’d get nothing done. So, when it’s time to clean up, we suggest you do things differently, and stop that mess happening in the first place.
If you’ve come for the cleaning, don’t worry. We’ll wade through the numerous methods you could use to scour your PC clean of filth, and do away with the clutter. But there’s more to a clean PC than emptying the trash; we’re going to seek out the ways you can keep your PC in tip-top super-efficient shape throughout the year. We’ll discover methods you can use to get organized without even having to think about it, and software that can make Windows a far more efficient operating system to use.
To continue the by now way overused house-cleaning metaphor, when we’re done with your PC, it’ll be the difference between your vacuum cleaner being in three distinct parts scattered whoknows-where around your home and having a robot vacuum that empties itself and gives your cat something to fight with. We’ll crib from other operating systems, we’ll pull in some obscure apps—whatever it takes to turn your PC into a tidy, slick, well-oiled machine that positively encourages you to maintain it.
THROW IT OUT
If you’ve been a PC user for any length of time, you’ve likely had a machine start to slow down. So, let’s begin by scraping the detritus of a year’s use from that drive, freeing up both storage space and, likely, a little memory at the same time. Step one: Head to Windows 10’s Settings panel (right-click the “Start” button, and select “Settings”). Click “Apps,” sort those apps by install date, and scroll to the bottom of the list. Work your way up, and chip away all those programs you never use by clicking them once, then clicking “Uninstall.”
Once you’re done with the pretty interface, open the ugly one. Microsoft’s doing its best to hide it, but Control Panel is still a thing; start typing its name in the search box, and it’ll appear as a result, which you can click to open it up. Head to “Programs > Uninstall a program,” and you can sort the list in more logical ways by clicking each column header. Annoyingly, Control Panel doesn’t always have the info it needs—half of your software won’t have a value listed for size, for example, and the “Last used on” column (if you enable it) doesn’t work like it once did.
Now ask your PA to clear your schedule, because you’re going to have to put some time and manual labor in. Dig around in the usual suspect folders, and clean out anything you don’t absolutely need. Scan your Steam library for barely played games, finally get around to kicking your Downloads folder into check, scrub off those out-of-focus photos. Sift through your Documents folder, and excise the clutter from your desktop—including that “old” folder, and the older “old” folder that’s made its way into there. Keep anything you don’t want to toss out, but do so on an external drive. Make sure you put these files in properly labeled, wellorganized folders, so you can later find them when you need them.
BRING IN THE CLEANER
Time to clear up the digital crumbs that, much like those documents, likely have absolutely no bearing on the performance of your PC whatsoever. This is about being thorough. The recently rebuilt CCleaner is, despite some rather overenthusiastic badgering should you leave it installed when you’re done with it, the best free tool for scouring away the cruft. Grab CCleaner Free from
www.ccleaner.com, and run through its installer. Run it, then hit “Analyze” to set it sniffing through your drives. You might need to close your web browser—for us, it dug up an unseemly number of Internet cache files, and a few other elements that could save a few gigabytes of space, vital if you’re booting from an SSD with limited space available. CCleaner won’t delete anything you actually need, but if you’re desperate to hang on to those Nvidia installer files, you can wade through the “Windows” and “Applications” tabs, and uncheck anything you’d like to ignore.
Now head to CCleaner’s “Registry” page. We’re not entering into any major discussion about the benefits of cleaning up your registry; in all likelihood, it’s going to make no difference, but hey, let’s do it. Click “Scan for Issues,” let it shuffle through your mess of a registry, then glance through the list—as with the main Cleaner portion, you’re likely to have no issues scraping away the things CCleaner suggests, but you may wish to disable deletions you think might cause problems before you run it. If you’re really paranoid, take a backup of your registry first: Run “regedit” via the search box, and use “File > Export” to write it to its own file.
CLEAN YOUR DESK
It pays to be at least a little agnostic with regard to computing platforms. Linux has its upsides, and we can look at macOS and see some good
in it—particularly when it comes to organizing files. Throw a bunch of things on the macOS Mojave desktop, for example, and you can ask it to pile those files into stacks, which are automatically sorted collections of files of the same type. Stardock, perennial provider of Windows tweaks, produces a tool that can do a very similar thing in the form of Fences, a $10 app with a 30-day free trial. Download it from www.stardock.com (use the “Try It Free” link), and install it—be sure to disable also installing Groupy during the process. Hit “Start 30 Day Trial,” and give Stardock an email address. If you’d rather keep your inbox clean while we’re on this kick, you may wish to head to
http://temp-mail.org to generate a burner email address there to verify your account.
Hit “Start using Fences.” It will pull your desktop’s files into some kind of order automatically. Creating a new fence is just a case of dragging a box on your desktop; check the “Sorting and Organizing” section of the Fences interface to see how you can automatically shuffle individual file types into their pens. You may also wish to invest in Stardock’s $30 Object Desktop package, which bundles Fences with Groupy (organize apps into tabbed groups), SpaceMonger ( manage hard disk space to free it up), and a host of frivolous visual “improvements” that you don’t need. If you don’t want to pay, the free Nimi Places ( http://mynimi.net) does most of the things Fences does without the same level of customization or flair.
YOU LACK DISCIPLINE
You are the reason your PC is in the state it’s in. Although you can get away with the kind of
virtual file shuffling that Fences et al pull off, that doesn’t help you find what you need when you need it. That’s going to be down to you changing your processes as much as possible. We’d start with getting used to throwing things to cloud storage, to ensure those files are available wherever you might need them, and crucially that they’re cluttering up a drive somewhere in the ether rather than filling up your own bits. Microsoft’s keen for you to use its own cloud service, OneDrive, so we’d probably start there; if you’re signed in to Windows 10 with a Microsoft account, you’ll already be connected up and ready to go. The basic plan includes a reasonable 5GB storage—not enough for a media library (and nor should you consider using cloud storage for such a thing), but enough for your documents and a good selection of photos.
A link to OneDrive should already be in your Windows Explorer sidebar. When you come to save a file, just expand this, and drop it in one of the folders within. Too much effort? Make a new folder within your OneDrive, er, drive, with an appropriate label. Drag that folder up into the “quick access” portion of the Explorer sidebar, and drop it somewhere prominent. Now it takes just one click, or one drag and drop effort, to save whatever you’re saving wherever it should go.
If 5GB isn’t enough for you, it’s either time to pony up for Office 365 (which grants you 1TB of OneDrive storage, with caveats) or sign up to more cloud storage services and repeat the process. Google Drive offers 15GB, and creates itself a neat mirrored folder on your machine, which you can use in the same way as you would OneDrive, and also includes unlimited photo storage at a reduced (but more limited) resolution. Box ( www.box.com) dishes up 10GB, with the same structure—although for both Box and Google Drive, you’ll need to install an app if you want desktop integration, which (depending on your viewpoint) might go against what we’re trying to do here. Assign one file type to one storage medium, one to another, and continue until everything’s shipshape.
Or do away with all the juggling: ODrive ( www.odrive.com) enables you to combine storage from a whole host of different cloud providers into one seemingly contiguous online drive. Don’t worry too much about the premium features, which you’ll lose after seven days, because there’s not an awful lot there that’ll affect your storage habits. Worry slightly more about the number of permissions you’ll need to give up to use it, which basically amounts to read and write access to your whole cloud storage repertoire. If you’re signing up, do so (at least) through a Google signup, which uses two-step authentication, and tread carefully.
THE SORTING MACHINE
If you’ve gotten this far, we’re going to presume you’re even lazier than we thought. Good news: We have the solution. DropIt ( http://
dropitproject.com) is presented as a
personal assistant for your files, and it makes sorting a large number of them tremendously easy. Set up a number of rules, and you can dump all your files on to the app’s icon, at which point DropIt will do the tedious work of putting them in the right place. It’s not just a mover—you can use it to split files, compress them, upload them to an FTP or SFTP server, or even generate fancypants galleries or indexes of your files, so you can find them easily later on if Windows Explorer somehow crumbles to dust and ceases to exist.
Most usefully, you can set DropIt to scan a folder and automatically apply its rules to the contents. Let’s do that now. Download the installer package from the DropIt site (it’s also available in portable form, so you could conceivably create a USB-based housekeeper to send around your home PC collection), and run through the install procedure, selecting the option to launch DropIt on the final screen. This launches DropIt in the form of an alwayson-top icon, on to which you can dump your files; double-clicking it puts the icon in your taskbar, so it’s less intrusive.
Right-click that DropIt icon, head to “Options,” open the “Monitoring” tab, then check the “Enable scan of monitored folders” box. Click “Add” followed by the little yellow folder icon—create yourself a folder (we called ours “Alfred”), drag it to your quick launch bar, and hit “Select Folder.” You can select from a bunch of profiles—basically, the rule collections DropIt uses to determine what to do with your files—in the drop-down box, but leave it on “Default” for now, and hit “Save.” Now to set a rule for that folder to follow. Right-click the DropIt icon again, and select “Associations.” It should automatically open up at the “Default” profile; let’s do something simple as an example, such as filtering out common image files, and dumping them in Windows’ own Pictures library. Name your rule “images” and in the rules box enter *.jpg;*.png;*.bmp and so on for all your favored image types. Set the action as “move” (you could choose “copy” if you were a masochistic file hoarder), and use the “Destination Folder” box to select the appropriate location. Hit “Save,” and you’re done—any images you drop in the folder will now, once a minute, be piped to the new location. Add another rule for files matching * (that is, any file), and send them to another folder for manual sorting. DropIt runs through the list in order, with the uppermost rules triggering first, so if you later want to sort a different file type (or use the funnel button to add additional filters, such as file size), make sure it appears before the catch-all at the end.