Cleaning out your computer!

General Information:
This guide is for educational and experimental purposes. Although I do provide programs, and useful tips toward tweaking, and/or fixing your computer, I do not take responsibility for anything that happens to your computer. I will be obligated to add warning signs to certain parts of the guide to bring to your attention that this part of the guide could harm your computer if not used properly. This guide is for use on sythe.org User Education Section, and is written by Training Assistance.

Section Index:

• Section One: Organizing
• Section Two: General Cleanup
• Section Three: Firewalls
• Section Four: Anti-Virus
• Section Five: Spyware Removal
• Section Six: Trojan Removal
• Section Seven: Memory Enhancement

Organizing Your Computer:
Organizing your computer can benefit you, the user, as well as the computer itself. Organizing let's you know where your files are, and lets your computer fetch those files faster. Organization skills crucially affect most persons that own a computer. Some people spend several minutes towards finding files when they could be doing something productive. Simple ways of organizing include:

• Group similar files in one folder
• Group different files in different sections
• Name the files appropriately
• Keep important documents in well-known places to the user
• Place stray files in a new folder

One of the most complicated places to organize is the start menu. Because most of your programs place a direct section in there, it gets tedious and tiresome to constantly look through a long list of files. It's not necessarily a good thing to organize a computer all at once. If you start organizing in small but effecient strives, you will get used to where the new location of the files are. There is some software that help you organize your computer, but most of it is commercial. The following software is in fact freeware, so you do not have to purchase it:

• Tidy Start Menu
  Tidy Start Menu helps you manage large start menus. Even though it is very simple, it is very effective. It let's you group your current start menu files and folders into commonly used folders (Entertainment, Games, Utilities, Programming, Etc.) I highly reccomend using this program if your start menu us getting unmanageable. You can find more information on this software here or download it here.

General Cleanup:
By general cleanup, I mean microsoft implemented cleanup. In this section we will be dealing with software already included within Windows Packages.

Disk Cleanup
Disk Cleanup is used to remove unwanted files or files that are cluttering space within your computer. These files include old internet files, office files, and standard temporary files. Disk Cleanup usually only helps the computer noticeable if the computer has not ran disk cleanup within the time frame of a year or months. Disk Cleanup can be accessed through your start menu:

• Click Start
• Navigate to All Programs
• Navigate to Accessories
• Navigate to System Tools
• Click Disk Cleanup

You are required to choose which drive you are wanting to search for unwanted files. You will generally select your filestorage drive, or hard drive. Standard filestorage drives for windows is the (C drive. Once you choose your drive, disk cleanup will search for all of the general unwanted windows files. When the search is complete, you will be able to decide which files you wanted removed from your computer by selecting or deselecting the checkboxes.

Defragmenting
Defragmenting is simply rearranging items on your hard drive to make it more accessible for your computer. When your computer can access that data faster, the general response that you wanted will be achieved faster. In layman's terms, it's organizing your hard drive. Microsoft has also been generous enough to provide a standard defragmenting utility which can be accessed by:

• Click Start
• Navigate to All Programs
• Navigate to Accessories
• Navigate to System Tools
• Click Disk Defragmenter

You are now, just as with the Disk Cleanup able to choose which drive you would like to organize. Again, you will want to choose your main filestorage drive seeing as thats the most cluttered drive and most populated. It will analyze where the files are at within that drive, and then begin to condense and organize them.

Firewalls:
Firewalls are used to monitor, permit, and block incoming data to your computer. The basic use is that so you can be in control of what's accessing your computer. These are very helpful when using a computer for private things (paying bills, exchanging important documents, transferring money) Firewalls are easy to get, they are cluttering the internet, but which ones work? I have tested various firewalls, and several that are particularly interesting are:

• Comodo Firewall
  Comodo Firewall is very unique, and by very unique I mean leak free. I tested the firewall by using various programs to see how it responded. It lets you fully control the firewall itself which means there aren't really any major restrictions when using it. Find more information about it here or download it here.

• Kerio Personal Firewall
  Kerio Personal Firewall (KPF) helps users control how their computers exchange data with other computers on the Internet or local network. Find out more information about here or download it here.

Anti-Virus:
Anti-Virus software prevents mallicious threats as well as removes them from your computer. These threats can be very dangerous to your computers safety, files, and data exchange. General Anti-Virus include:

• AVG Free Edition is the well-known anti-virus protection tool. AVG Free is available free-of-charge to home users for the life of the product! Rapid virus database updates are available for the lifetime of the product, thereby providing the high-level of detection capability that millions of users around the world trust to protect their computers. AVG Free is easy-to-use and will not slow your system down (low system resource requirements). Learn more about it here or download it here.

• Or more Anti-Virus at download.com's Security Section.

Spyware Removal:
Spyware removal programs do exactly what they say, remove spyware and adware that force adverts onto your computer to convince or hassle you into using them. Although they may seem harmless, they are most definitly not. These threats can take personal information as well as private data off of your computers. Spyware Removal programs are common, but if you aren't careful, they can also be spyware themselves. I suggest downloading:

• Ad-aware
  Known for it's effecient threat detection as well as removal. A general complete computer scan could take a while pending on how many files are stored on your computer, but it's well worth the wait. Find more information here or download it here.

Trojan Removal:
Don't get me started on trojans, seeing as I had to remove five from using internet explorer just yesterday. Trojans are mallicious infections that litterally destroy files on your computer, force programs advertisements onto your computer popping up in windows such as firefox and internet explorer. Or doing other harmful things to your computer. These are highly dangerous and should not be removed by just any run of the mill program. I highly reccomend VundoFix:

• VundoFix
  I had to use VundoFix recently, and I was highly surprised at my results. It cleaned the trojans off my computer as well as other replication trojans. So far I have not had anymore annoying advertisement pop-ups nor internet explorer popping up and creating infinite more internet explorers. For more information about VundoFix visit here or to download it visit here.

Memory Enhancement:
By memory, I mean your computer's virtual memory, as well as your RAM. Virtual Memory is basically memory that is non-contiguous that windows makes seem contiguous. It's saying "Hey, I have 4000 contiguous memory!" When you really have 3000. The benefits of using this is that it increases your computers speed convincing it you have more memory. You can change your virtual memory by:

• Click the Start Button
• Navigate to My Computer
• Right Click My Computer
• Click Properties
• Click the tab labeled Advanced
• Under Performance click Settings
• Click the tab labeled Advanced
• Make sure both Processor Scheduling and Memory Usage are on Programs
• Under Virtual Memory click Change
• Change Minimum to 2000 if possible
• Change Maximum to 3000 if possible

Ram Enhancement Software
There is other RAM enhancement software. Because RAM stores a lot of temporary memory, your computer could become temporary slow at times, or skip now and then. A very good RAM enhancement program named "Hare" is provided at Dachshund's Official Website.

• Hare
  It allows you to wash and defragment your RAM. Along with RAM enhancement, HARE also enhances graphics card output and allows the user to refresh the Windows Database (This is not damaging to your computer.) More information Hare can be found here and a free trial can be found here.

 

Good guide, this will help some, keep up the good work

 

good guide thanks

 

i didnt read it but its long and the main man said good guide so yeah

thanks for the guide

i just do a bunch of virus scans and back up the data and it runs fine =)

 

Deleted the spam. Moved to user ed section.