Cleaning up my machine… a simple guide to a leaner, keener PC

Given the sudden increase in free time when I was locked out of the boards (was it something I said?), I decided to put the time to good use and do some tweaking on my machine. Apart from adding the excellent Proxomitron, I thought I 'd clear out some of the usual M$ bloat and try and speed things up.

First off, I cleared out the huge amount of space used by XP's System Restore. This got me back about 1 gig, and if you've not done it before you should. Will probably save you 2+ gigs (especially if you updated to XP2). It's easy enough to do and since I've only got a 20 gig drive it's the kind of thing I need to do every now and then.

Before you start, check your C Drive file usage. Then make a new System Restore point (assuming you're happy with current performance). Location: Start Menu>Help & Support>

Then locate Disk Cleanup (it will be in your System Tools on the Start Menu). This may take a while to load. Once it has, go to 'More Options' and select the Clean Up button under System Restore, then click ok. Now check your file usage again. Impressive, huh?

My next problem is that my machine is slower than it ought to be. I'm running a fairly heavily loaded 1.65 Ghz processor with only 256 MB of RAM. I find that large folders take a while to load fully and I get tired of watching that little flashlight gizmo winking at me. Anyway, problem was easily solved. I went back to my C Drive (Local Disk:C in My Computer), right clicked and selected properties. Then I switched off "Allow indexing service for faster searches" option. Major improvement in speed followed. I've about halved programme load time, and I get nary a hint of that flashlight icon any more. Much faster boot-up as well. For me anyway, this is a real improvement.

All this work led me to wondering why my Opera folder was taking up so much space. So I had a bit of a clear-out of my mail/newsfeeds/newsgroups. I deleted umpteen thousand stored messages and then re-indexed my mail. This saved some 50 MB (not as impressive as killing the M$ bloat, but useful). Re-indexing is easy enough:

Close Opera

Go to the Opera folder and make a copy of your Mail folder (this is "just in case"). Now, open the real Mail folder (not the copy) and simply delete the Lexicon folder. You might be interested in checking it's size first. Now re-open Opera. It'll re-index everything for you, and if you then check the Lexicon folder again you'll see just how much space has been recovered. (You can then dump the copied Mail folder you made earlier).

Now my one beef here is actually two beefs. Deleting umpteen newsgroup messages ought to be automated in M2, via a maintenance/purge system And re-indexing should be controlled via the UI (with the option to run both on a schedule).

That said, I'm using Opera pretty much exclusively now for all my POP mail, all my newsgroups and news feeds and am finding it the perfect companion.

This Post Has 5 Comments

  1. lokutus-prime

    23 Feb 2005

    Hello Words,

    I want to thank you for your 'tips' and the clear and comprehensive way in which you described what to do. I recovered a couple of gigabytes space on drive C. Turning off the indexing has resulted in a noticeable increase in speed.

    Excellent!

  2. Anonymous

    23 Feb 2005

    Gained 1,2gb on my hd, if turning off the indexing will speed things up remains to see. It sure takes some time for it to do whatever changes it does when turning indexing off.

    One would believe that the indexing would make things faster, but since it is Microsoft, eeehhhrmm….

    Well guess I'll go and have some brewskis while waiting for the de-indexing to complete.

    Thanks for the tips Words :up:

  3. bluesman2333

    23 Feb 2005

    If you haven't discovered BlackViper yet, you will be amazed at what else you can do. 🙂

  5. process

    23 Feb 2005

    This comment is a reply to Bluesman… somehow the order of comments is… er… crocked :irked:

Comments are closed.

Close Menu