By Lou Dolinar
First in a series
Updated Feb. 14, 2006

Does your computer have the blahs? Starts slow, runs slow, is overwhelmed by popups? Does your router's Internet connection connection blink furiously, 24/7? Maybe its time to clean up your computer.

Its been about a year since we ran through the basics here, as old threats like spyware and viruses have increased, and new tools, including some from Microsoft, have emerged to deal with them. Here's the basic drill I recently went through, which greatly improved my computer's performance. This covers Windows XP, but most of it works for earlier versions as well.

Get rid of any old programs you don't use regularly, including those downloads you tried and decided not to buy. They don't just clutter up your disk drive, they load up the registry and in a lot of cases, load at startup, wasting system resources. Go to Control Panel/Add or Remove Programs, and be ruthless.

Open up Internet Explorer. Go to Tools, Windows Update, and make sure you have the latest version of Windows, including Service Pack 2. This gives you some additional tools for managing digital dust bunnies and cyber-vermin. Also under Tools, make sure your popup blocker is turned on, then select Manage Add Ons. This lets you examine an turn on or off so-called browser helper objects, which can be spyware or merely troublesome. If you don't know what it does, Google it to find out or turn it off. You can always restore any functionality you miss.

Finally, hit “Internet Options” Under General/Temporary Internet Files, select “Delete Files” which clears the sometimes damaged cache of frequently accessed sites. You should also “Delete Cookies” but remember you will lose some of your saved account names and passwords. Also go to the built in to Windows ( Start menu/Accessories/System Tools/Disk Cleanup) is the Disk Cleanup Utility which gives you lots of useful options, including compressing old files, and getting rid of various unnecessary ones.

You can automate many of these manual deletion steps with a couple of free programs. Start with CleanUp! 4.0 (http://www.stevengould.org/software/cleanup/) This program never seems to get me into trouble by deleting stuff I need. The only thing you need to watch: If you have a lot of low-security passwords (newspaper registration, for example) you have to tell it to ignore those sites when its cleaning out cookies.

Get a copy of Easy Cleaner 2.0 at http://personal.inet.fi/business/toniarts/. (Don't bother with the pay site). Easy Cleaner also duplicates the most of the built-in Windows procedures we outlined above, but its main function is to get rid of obsolete registry entries. It also identifies duplicate files, which seem to proliferate in particular on computers used for digital photography, and helps you get rid of files in the temp directory, which almost always can safely be deleted. You'll get somewhat better results from similar for-fee products like Symantec's Norton family, but hey the price is right. Always run the registry cleaner after you've cleaned out useless programs.

Microsoft Antispyware (www.microsoft.com/spyware) is another great addition to the free spyware fighting arsenal that we always recommended, including Spybot Search and Destroy (www.safer-networking.org) and Ad-Aware (www.lavasoftusa.com). It is a little tedious to run all three, but each generally finds a couple of problems the others miss. I'll note here that the industry standard for-fee program, Webroot's Spy Sweeper 3.0 ($29.95, www.webroot.com), generally gets better ratings overall.

One general purpose cleaning tip for old files: Go to your various document folders, and sort them by file size, largest to smallest. You'd be surprised how much junk you'll notice that way.

The last step in a clean up: Check and repack your disk. Open up My Computer, right-click on the disk drive, and select Properties from the menu. Select the “Tools” tab and hit the “Check Now” button for Error-checking. This will scan the entire file system for errors the next time you restart, which you should do now. It may take an hour or so to complete the scan and repairs. Once the scan is done, go back to the “Tools” tab and select the “Defragment Now” button. That will rearrange your files on disk to be contiguous, so they'll load faster and without error.

Next time out, we'll look at a whole new area of PC headaches, names the proliferation of impolite startup items.