| Article Index |
|---|
| Sweep Your System Clean with CCleaner |
| The Registry |
| Final Words |
| All Pages |
As you work with your computer, Windows does a lot of things behind the scenes to save your personalized settings and to start programs faster.
The problem is, sometimes these settings get messed up or cause problems with other applications. Sometimes the temp files that speed up your system are infected. Whatever the problem you have, I always clear out all the temporary files and set all setting back to their factory defaults.
Follow along as we step through how we use CCleaner to wipe the slate clean.
CCleaner is a wonderful program that takes away a lot of the mundane tasks that we used to perform manually. I highly recommend installing this on your machine and keeping it handy, even if you're not currently fixing your computer.
Install CCleaner with most default settings. There's just one setting that we want to disable, where it asks you if you want to install the Yahoo Toolbar. The last thing we want to do right now is add more clutter when we're trying to clean up.
First we want to use the Cleaner section, and it should already be selected. You should notice that within that section, the Windows tab is selected along with alot of default settings. We're going to keep all these settings and add a few more.
Under "Internet Explorer":
- Check Auto Complete Form History. This will reset all of those form fields that you've entered in the past. Besides cluttering up your system, it's horrible security wise.
Under "System"
- Check DNS Cache. A DNS cache is used to store internet address lookups. When you type in a domain name like www.reiach.ca, your computer needs to convert that name into an IP Address. It does this by performing a DNS lookup. IP addresses don't change often so instead of your computer looking up the address each time, it looks it up once, stores the address and then updates the address after a period of time has elapsed. Malware sometimes hijacks your cache to point popular domain names to thier own servers to steal your information.
Under "Advanced"
- Check "Old Prefetch data". There's some controversy around whether or not this is useful to clear, but lets just err on the safe side.
- Check... honestly, I check off everything else under the "Advanced" tab except for "Wipe Free Space". Our goal here is to revert things back to thier default settings. A Clean slate.
Click on the Analyze button and once it's complete, click on the "Run Cleaner" button.
It may take several minutes to process everything. Once it's done, we move onto the "Registry" tab.
