People ask me what is the best way to keep their computer's clean? My response is always the same, regular, constant, consistent housekeeping. If you value your computer and use it nearly as much as you use your car on a daily basis, you'll understand that if you don't take care of what is under your computer's hood, the repair costs can be just as bad if not worse than say neglecting to change the brakes on your car or not doing a scheduled oil change. Yes, it really is that bad.

Housekeeping on a computer isn't that difficult, just time consuming like everything else. On these pages, I put together a nice FREE arsenal of tips and some pieces of code that will help keep this down to a minimum.

When a user logs into Windows whether it be XP Home or XP Pro, several things happen. Windows sets up the user's desktop, arranges it per the user's desired settings, sets up your background picture if you've set one and makes sure that for the most part, your computing experience will be enjoyable. What you don't see happening is all that technical stuff you probably don't want to know or hear about is choking  because of how your computer is currently set up. We're going to address and resolve those problems here.

1. A lot of people want to know the best way to keep their computers running the best, and sometimes better than when they bought it. The answer is simple, only install the programs you need to use, and uninstall all the bloatware (packaged software bundles) that come on your machine. Most times, people won't be using that free copy of How to Cook, or all those fancy games that they don't even know about, let's go ahead and get rid of them.

Click on Start, Settings, Control Panel, Add/Remove Programs. This is a great place to look for things that you don't necessarily use or hardly ever use at all. Once the list populates, you can see the name of the program, remove it, and even the frequency in which you use it. This is pretty helpful. For those of you that just bought brand new computers that have all the %brandname% (Dell, HP, Toshiba) software/games/applications, here's where you go to get rid of it all. No you don't need to have all of it if any of it. Such examples would be like a Dell Wireless Management Utility. You don't need this one because Windows XP has one built into it. Go through this list of programs and uninstall the ones that you know you don't need or aren't using. If you're not sure as an example you see an entry called Python Explorer, google it. It got there one of three ways, during Factory Pre-install, Post Installed by you, or Post installed by Spyware or Malware and we'll get to that as well.

This command brings up the currently logged in user's Temporary Files location, as you can see below. What you're going find here is any file that had to be created by the system for use for a program such as a messenger program like MSN messenger, AOL or Yahoo Messenger or maybe a temporary copy of an office document you may be working on. The possibilities of what could be in are endless. What's important here is that once the system is done using the file in this location IT DOESN'T DELETE IT! It just stays here, and this location grows and grows and grows! I've seen some computers that have had literally thousands of items in here because they have never been deleted. Clean this area out! The problem with cleaning this folder out is that some files stored here are locked by the system even though it's no longer using the file. I personally use a free program call File Unlocker 1.8.7 that allows me to unlock these "system locked" files and continue to delete them straight out.

Once this area is cleaned out, I continue with routine cleaning by locating the Temp folder located at C:\Windows\Temp as shown below:

You should know that some of files located in this folder are duplicated from the previous location that we just cleaned. This is normal. Just clean these out as normal.

The next thing we're going to do is create a shortcut on your desktop that's going to really do some heavy hitting damage in our cleaning (that's a good thing!) and you'll probably only need to run this once, maybe twice every month because of how thorough it is.

Right click anywhere in the open area of your desktop and on the drop down menu, click new, shortcut. You'll be presented with a window that asks for the location path of the item that the shortcut is for. In that location, type in the following (copy and paste the following to make it easier!):

%SystemRoot%\System32\Cmd.exe /c Cleanmgr /sageset:35 & Cleanmgr /sagerun:35

Once you do that, you'll have a shortcut on your desktop that looks like this:

Now here's where the magic really happens, when you double click on this shortcut, you're going to see this pop up:

EVERYTHING on this list is JUNK that you don't need to keep, check all the boxes ensuring you scroll down to the bottom of the list and click on the OK button. Now if you have NEVER done this before it will take some time to go through. But once you do it, subsequent runs will be that much faster. I tell you from personal knowledge that this works well. I use it regularly and it never ceases to amaze me. I got this from a friend of mine that runs XP on a FAT32 partition (FAT32 is a type of file system) and he uses this cleaning method to clean out fresh installs along with some other tips i'm going to pass on to you to not only keep his computer running clean and fast, but when we go to create a recovery image, the final image can and will fit on a single DVD.  I'm going to share a couple of other things from him and by no means am I taking credit for it, it's his knowledge and he was just kind enough to share it with me.

Another great batch file, short, sweet and quite to the point, this one actually searches out your hard drive based on environmental variables to locate and delete temporary files, trash files and pretty much all the junk you DON'T need to keep on your computer. There is a catch, this script uses a DOS based program called DELTREE. DELTREE is a powerful DOS program that, as its implies, can delete a "tree" of information in one blast. In order for this script to work, you need to copy DELTREE to the C:\Windows\System32 folder. Once it's there, the magic happens. Another thing that is great about the second script is you can either run it manually by just double clicking on it OR, as I normally do, put it in your startup folder and then it runs when ever you restart your computer or log in. You can get the created Cleanmgr shortcut, DELTREE, and the Cleanup batch file by clicking on the following link, just save it and extract it to your desktop so you don't lose it.

https://www.box.net/shared/fdmuimtvr1

Another great way to keep it clean is by dumping all those Microsoft Hotfix backup files. Every time you download updates from Microsoft, they create a hidden Hotfix backup at C:\Windows. You can identify these files by opening windows explorer, then clicking up on the menu line on Tools, Folder Options. In the folder options, click on the View tab, scroll down on the list and click the spot that says "Show hidden files and folders". Click on ok and navigate to C:\Windows and expand/open it and you'll be presented with a slew of folders in blue text (indicating that they are compressed as well) starting with $NtUninstall. You have a few options to deal with these, you can either use the tool i'm going to provide you to safely remove them, OR you can use Ultimate Defrag to safely move them to the slower part of the hard drive so they don't have as much of an impact on your system speed. Now, if you're like me, or even if you're not, it's safe to say that normally, unless you're running very custom software, 99% of the Microsoft updates are NOT going to cause problems with your computer when they get installed. IF for whatever reason they do, that indicates that you already had issues to begin with and that hotfix just made things worse. So for those of you that want to safely remove those files, the following link will provide you with a batch file:

https://www.box.net/shared/6ix175mjlr

Again, download it to your desktop, extract the files and double click on the file that named deletehotfixbackups. A black DOS window pops up and you suddenly see a bunch of compressed files being removed from your computer. That's all there is to it. Now you might be wondering if it's really safe to remove these hotfix backups. In my 10+ years of working with Windows, I have not came across a reason on an everyday home user's computer to have to keep them. There's other ways to fix the problem rather than keeping copies of everything. Plus it takes up much needed disk space, but to each their own I guess.

Now that we got that out of the way, we're ready to do some serious under the hood work. The next part of this is going to be geared to speeding things up for maximum performance.