How To Use Command Prompt To Clean Computer

Calculator cleanup is the one matter yous tin do every day that will keep you flush with deejay space and help you free up valuable arrangement resources. Furthermore, actual physical cleanup, as in dusting, will allow your computer to literally breathe easier, and in turn prolong the life of your system.

In this lesson we're going to outset by focusing on some of the simplest deportment you can apply for immediate results. These deportment require no previous training or knowledge and, in fact, as a Windows user, you lot should or may already be familiar with many of these.

In the first department, nosotros'll delve into cleaning upwards your system including routing out all those pesky startup items, removing temporary files, and uninstalling old, unused applications. From at that place, nosotros move on to disk maintenance. This task has gotten considerably easier in recent Windows versions but understanding your options is still of import.

Finally, as we mentioned earlier, there'southward dusting, as in literal removal of hair and dirt from your estimator's interior. We want to stress how much more than effective a computer is at dissipating oestrus and cooling its internal components when they're not coated in a thick coat of fur.

Disabling startup items

One of the best ways to unburden your computer and quickly free up resources, is to disable items that automatically launch when Windows boots. These startup items not simply suck up system resources like lilliputian vampires, they also often cause your figurer to boot longer.

The onetime school style to bargain with startup items is to use the "System Configuration" ("SysConfig") utility on Windows 7. Launch a "Run" window by typing "WIN + R" and then "msconfig."

On the "System Configuration" utility, select the "Startup" tab. Y'all exercise want to do some caution here. While you won't break your system by disabling everything, you lot may disable some programs that are genuinely useful, similar Dropbox.

In the preceding screenshot, at that place'southward not a whole lot to pore over considering it was taken on a virtual auto that has the bare minimum of programs installed. Regardless, to disable a startup program, uncheck the box next to information technology, and restart your organisation.

Let's look at our Windows 8.ten setup to run across a more useful instance. If you try to use "Sysconfig" on Windows 8.x, it will merely redirect you lot to the "Task Managing director," which can be more than easily accessed by going directly to it either from the Taskbar:

Or merely hit "WIN" and type "task" and it should appear as the top search consequence:

It'south worth noting that yous can also apply the CTRL + SHIFT + ESC shortcut cardinal combination to bring up Chore Manager without clicking anywhere.

When the "Chore Managing director" opens, select the "Startup" tab and behold the celebrity of your figurer'southward burdens. You can see your startup items, their status, and the bear upon they have on your system. You lot tin can sort them of class, by clicking the headers. In the post-obit screenshot, nosotros've sorted by "Startup impact."

If yous're unsure what does what, you lot can right-click on any item and selet "Search online" to find out exactly what something is and what information technology does.

Co-ordinate to Microsoft, impact is based on how much CPU and disk usage occurs at startup:

• Loftier impact – Apps that use more than 1 2nd of CPU time or more 3 MB of disk I/O at startup
• Medium impact – Apps that utilise 300 ms – 1000 ms of CPU fourth dimension or 300 KB – 3 MB of deejay I/O
• Low touch – Apps that use less than 300 ms of CPU time and less than 300 KB of disk I/O

One 2nd might non seem like a lot, but keep in mind, the above screenshot depicts a system that doesn't have a ton of stuff installed. Imagine a organization with many more things in the startup routine. If you have a dozen high impact startup items in addition to the other medium and depression affect items, and they're all requiring CPU time and disk I/O, startup time increases proportionately.

Microsoft breaks downward startup apps and provides guidance on how to deal with several categories of startup apps, including utilities that sync your PC or for fill-in and recovery, updaters, notifiers, and more.

It's safe to say that in whatever consequence, you can disable most, if non all startup items and it volition not adversely affect your system. That said, as we mentioned before, if you do disable everything, you may lose functionality that you otherwise wanted. In the to a higher place case, if nosotros disabled "Dropbox" it would no longer outset automatically and sync changes. We'd instead have to manually start information technology, and then we might equally well leave it enabled.

Disk Cleanup

The "Deejay Cleanup" utility is a very simple tool that allows you quickly delete stuff like temporary and cache files so yous can complimentary up space on your hard bulldoze(s).

In Windows seven you lot can open up it from Start -> All Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools.

In Windows 8.ten, yous have several options. The easiest is to hit the "WIN" key and type "disk cleanup" and then choose "Free upwardly deejay space by deleting unnecessary files."

When "Deejay Cleanup" begins, if you have more than one drive installed, yous will need to choose the one you want to cleanup outset. Here in our example, nosotros choose the system bulldoze (C:).

The "Deejay Cleanup" tool will permit y'all scroll through and see what is taking up infinite. You can read a brief description of what it is you'd be deleting. You can as well view the files at any time by clicking on the "View Files" button, or if you lot have administrative access, you can click "Clean upwards system files" and the "Disk Cleanup" tool will restart in admin manner.

Note here in the following screenshot, we've restarted in administrative cleanup mode and "Deejay Cleanup" has plant another 500 MB of space it can free upward (Windows Update files). This will requite us 455 MB versus xc MB in not-admin mode.

Notation also, in admin mode you proceeds another tab named "More Options," which gives us farther ways to free up valuable disk infinite. Of particular annotation here is the "Organization Restore and Shadow Copies" option, which deletes all only the near contempo "system restore" points. If you've been using your computer for a while and you lot've never cleaned out your restore points, this option can sometimes free up gigabytes of space without adversely affecting your computer – assuming everything is running smoothly at the moment and then you lot don't need to curlicue back whatever recent changes.

Note also, the "Programs and Features" clean up button. If you click this, information technology volition open the "Programs and Features" control console, which will let you lot uninstall unnecessary and unused applications, which we're going to now talk about in the next section.

Uninstalling Applications and Freeing up Disk Space

Let's say that you disable something in your startup items, but then yous realize that you don't really apply that plan. In that case, why not just uninstall information technology? That style, not simply do you remove the startup item, but the whole useless application, thus freeing upward disk space in the process.

On Windows seven and Windows 8.x, removing an application is accomplished past opening the "Programs and Features" control console. On Windows 7, open the Command Console from the "Start" card.

On Windows 8.ten, y'all can access the "Programs and Features" command panel straight by right-clicking on the "Outset" push button and selecting it from the context menu.

With the "Programs and Features" control panel open, yous tin can click on the application you want to uninstall.

In the above instance, we see that from the previous department that Google Drive has a loftier touch on startup, and since we utilize Dropbox as our primary cloud service, nosotros can but remove Drive and use it when we need to through the web interface.

The approach y'all have to this is completely up to you. Y'all may decide you desire to just disable the startup program or remove the whole shebang. That said, there's an even easier way to do all this.

Using CCleaner

CCleaner is a free program from Piriform software that takes the work out of cleaning upwards your computer. Make sure that you download the "Slim" installer version that doesn't contain any toolbars or other crapware. Aye, it's ironic that a software named "crap cleaner" actually distributes more than crapware by default, but as long as you don't download the wrong version you'll be fine. And it is otherwise a skilful piece of software.

When yous first execute CCleaner, it opens upward to the "Cleaner" screen, which allows you lot to make clean up your organization such every bit browser cache files, recently used items, and also articulate things related to specific "Applications" such as cache and log files.

When y'all click "Clarify" all the stuff on your system that tin be deleted volition be displayed. If you don't desire to delete something, so you lot can uncheck it. Otherwise click "Run Cleaner" to scour your organisation clean. In this instance, when we clicked the cleaner, nosotros were able to articulate up about four gigabytes of bulldoze space!

What we're really interested here is the "Tools" functions, specifically "Uninstall" and "Startup." On the "Uninstall" pane, you can featherbed the "Programs and Features" control panel altogether and uninstall stuff here. Merely click the detail you desire to remove and click "Run Uninstaller" to begin the removal process.

Moving to the "Startup" tools, we see nosotros accept the aforementioned kind of options equally in "Sysconfig" and the "Job Manager." You can disable/enable anything past selecting the item or items (hold the "CTRL" button to select multiple items), so click "Disable."

While this method isn't as informative as the Task Manager'south with its "Startup Bear upon," it'southward merely as effective, and puts everything in i place. If you want a more extensive bout of CCleaner'south features, then we urge you lot to check out this article.

Disk maintenance

Deejay maintenance is kind of a misnomer. You don't really need to "maintain" anything and in fact, your figurer will likely do a lot of stuff automatically to continue you disks running optimally. Still, we feel you should educate yourselves on how disk drives work, and what you can do to extend their life.

SSD vs. HDD

Today, difficult drives in computers come up in 2 flavors: the SSD and HDD. An SSD or solid state drive, is sort of a container full of flash memory. Basically it'south RAM, simply dissimilar RAM, the content in an SSD retain their contents afterwards yous turn off the power.

Hard drives by contrast, are comprised of chop-chop spinning platters, on which all the data in your estimator is written. To observe and retrieve the data, a difficult drive has heads, which read the surface of these platters kind of like you might walk to the stacks in a library and recall a book or books from their shelves.

SSDs, because they're so similar to RAM, are superior to old school spinning difficult drives because they're consistently faster at accessing and retrieving data. In other words, when you load an application from an SSD, yous don't need to wait for the caput to find and read the data on spinning platters, it's just in that location and the only delay you might experience is the time it takes for the SSD to read its contents and store it in the computer'south memory.

Do y'all need to defrag?

The thing nigh HDDs is that over time, the books you lot take off the shelf are replaced by other books, whatsoever books your want to return to the stacks are stuck wherever there is space. So instead of having all your data in face-to-face chunks, it ends up spread about or "fragmented." Over time, it becomes increasingly more time consuming to retrieve your data considering the hard bulldoze has to read part of information technology from i area on the platter(s) and another part of it somewhere else.

Defragmenting software is meant to have all those books and put them back together on their shelves so the computer can find them once more more than efficiently. This works to nifty result on traditional spinning platter drives, but not so much on solid land drives, and can really decrease the lifespan of your SSD.

You lot tin can only write to an SSD a finite number of times. Over the course of time, information technology volition lose its ability to concord on to the data and become bad. When you defrag, information technology reads information scattered nigh your hard drive, stores it in RAM, and so deposits information technology where it needs to exist. If necessary, it volition read data that is stored in the wrong place and deposit in some other empty infinite on the drive in lodge to put all the data dorsum together.

Doing this, as you tin imagine, means that the drive is read and written more with normal utilize and as such, defragging effectively shortens the life of an SSD past unnecessarily writing data to the drive. In truth, y'all don't fifty-fifty need to defrag an SSD because of the way they work.

How to Defrag

Defragmenting your drive is like shooting fish in a barrel and the figurer probable already does it for you around once a week. Still, if you employ your computer a lot and do a lot of things where you're copying many files to and from the hard drive, then y'all may see some fragmentation. And while nosotros don't recall it will be enough to actually slow your organisation down, y'all can still initiate a manual defrag anytime you want though to exist honest, it's not every bit much fun as the blithe defragmenter on Windows 9x.

You tin launch the defragmenter in Windows 7:

All Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools -> Deejay Defragmenter

Or just click on the "Start" button and blazon "defrag" in the search box.

Similarly, the fastest manner to open the defragmenter in Windows 8.x is to hit the "WIN" button and type "defrag."

Note, in Windows 8.x, the defragmenter has been renamed to "Optimize Drives" because you can't defrag an SSD. Instead, the drive optimizer "trims" your SSD, which substantially ways it tells the estimator which parts of your drive no longer contain data and frees them for later on apply.

As you lot can see in the case below, we have several drives to choose from and the optimizer lists your drives' media type so there'due south no guessing which is an SSD and which isn't.

Click the "Modify settings" push to access farther options.

If you want to change the optimization schedule, y'all can have information technology run on daily, weekly, or monthly ground, or you can plow it off altogether. Retrieve though, you will need to optimize your drive manually if you do turn off the schedule.

If there are any drives y'all don't desire to optimize automatically, and then you tin can deselect i or all the drives from their optimization schedules. If you exercise this yet, call back you volition demand to perform optimizations manually.

Checking Your Hard Drives Integrity

While hard drive'south integrity and reliability isn't an everyday PC maintenance thing, the fact is if you've never had a difficult drive fail on you, then you're very lucky. There's no sure manner to tell if a hard drive is virtually to fail, they're like earthquakes – you might get some warning or ordinarily it'due south over before yous understand what'southward happened.

That said, hard drives employ a technology chosen S.1000.A.R.T. to test their reliability and give you an idea of whether they're declining. You can't access your hard drive'southward Due south.M.A.R.T. data without third-political party software but you tin can view its status.

Simply open a control prompt past typing "WIN + R" and then from the "Run" window type "CMD" and striking "OK" or "Enter."

From the "Command Prompt" type "wmic" and and then hit "Enter". Then type "diskdrive get status" and hit "Enter." Depending on how many devices you take installed, it will cycle through and bank check the S.K.A.R.T. condition of each and render a result.

As the higher up screenshot indicates, we got results for nine drives (4 or which are removable disks) and at that place's no telling them autonomously. Needless-to-say, if we did go a troubling result, we'd need to investigate further with special software.

Nosotros advise reading farther on how to run across if your hard drive is dying. If you lot have a hard drive that is starting to fail and you catch it in time, y'all tin probably salvage most or all your data!

Yous may not exercise Windows, merely you'll still have to dust

There are many reasons yous should routinely clean, as in literally sweep out and dust your computer.

There are a couple of really skilful reasons you lot should do this and they all take to practise with heat. Heat is difficult on electronics and when hair and grit collect on your computer'due south internals, it substantially blankets your components and prevents rut from escaping.

Farther, over time your system's cooling fans become chock-full and caked with dust, which compromises their effectiveness.

Then, what you're dealing with is a organisation that cannot quickly shed rut and thus ends up cooking itself. You can usually tell when you lot demand to clean your computer past looking at the intakes and frazzle ports. Unremarkably information technology's as like shooting fish in a barrel as glancing at the footling holes that allow air to enter and exit. If those are covered or caked with dust, then it's time to clean your computer.

You'll have to close downward and unplug your estimator before you lot begin, and and then we recommend you have the unabridged unit of measurement outside. Once you start cleaning it out, all that grit and hair that has collected inside will need to be dislodged. You don't desire to innovate, or reintroduce all that into your firm.

Canned air or vacuum?

While it may see easy to but exit the vacuum cleaner and suck all that stuff out, don't. Vacuum cleaners tin can discharge static electricity onto your computer's fragile electronic components. We recommend canned air, to blast the dirt out.

How-To Geek provides a thorough how-to on cleaning out your computer. It'due south non a terribly complicated performance but information technology is necessary, and tin extend the life of your system.

Coming up Next …

Tomorrow we're going to move on to system security. Nosotros'll exist detailing essential security necessities including threat avoidance, anti-virus software, browser extensions and, finally, terminal just certainly non least, creating strong passwords.

Source: https://www.howtogeek.com/school/pc-maintenance-for-beginners/lesson2/

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