Computers have a habit of attracting more than their fair share of unwanted files. Martin Walker shows you how to clear away the cobwebs, and streamline the operation of your PC at the same time.
Spring‑cleaning is one of those traditional activities that's calculated to clear away the winter blues. It involves lots of dusting and airing, cleaning of windows to let in more of the spring sunshine, and, more often than not, checking that your favourite paintbrush still has some bristles left and making a few trips to the local DIY superstore. It's still not too late to provide the same treatment for your PC. After all, many people's hard disks end up containing a host of outdated applications, stray and lost files, and forgotten shareware programs that earned no more than one quick look after falling off the cover of a computer magazine. With a little bit of effort, it's not unusual to regain 50Mb or more of hard disk space. While having a clear‑out, many people will find that the contents of their hard disk strongly resemble Steptoe's yard, with hordes of disorganised folders everywhere. If nothing else, re‑organising the contents of your hard drive will make it easier to find files in future, and you may well also uncover yet more candidates for deletion.
There are additional benefits to PC spring‑cleaning above and beyond that of increased hard disk space and organisation. Badly behaved installations don't just leave a trail of files in their wake: sometimes they leave drivers installed, even if the program itself is long gone. By finding and removing these, you may speed up the operation of your PC (faster boot‑up times and more memory available when it's up and running). While we're about it, this is also an ideal time to check on the Internet that you have the most recent driver versions, to get maximum performance from your hardware. So, just like traditional spring‑cleaning, this gives you a chance not only to tidy up and thoroughly clear out the system, but also to streamline the way your PC works, and make it just that little bit more pleasant to use on a day‑to‑day basis.
Fighting The Flab
If you want to clear a bit more space on your hard disk, there are probably plenty of superfluous files. If you already follow a sensible regime when installing new versions of programs on your hard disk, at least you won't have the clutter of obsolete applications (see 'Removing Old Programs', later in this article). For most people, the first and easiest way of regaining some space will be to search out and destroy any remaining temporary files. Many applications create files for temporary use, perhaps holding previous edits of programs (for Undo functions), or blocks of text saved during editing (used by cut, copy and paste functions), but normally a well‑behaved application will delete all of these on exit. However, not all applications are well behaved, and if you ever suffer from a crash, any temporary files open at the time will remain on your system. These are easy to find, though, as they normally have filenames that end in 'TMP'. You can root them out using the standard Find function on the Taskbar, typing in *.TMP and then, if you're happy that they contain no useful data, delete the lot. Occasionally, their contents may be of use — if you've just had a crash, a remaining temporary file may just contain some or all of the data that you were working on shortly before it happened. In this case, it's well worth looking at the file in the original application — it could save you a lot of retyping.
The next most popular category for extinction is the BAK file, created automatically by many programs when you save a new version (just in case you change your mind). Making backups is a sensible way to work, whether you do it manually or use the Autosave feature provided by many programs; but, periodically, it's worth clearing out ancient ones. The best time to do this is just after you've saved a backup version of your data in compressed format onto another drive, so you still have copies of it in case of accidents.
When some installations put updated versions of system files onto your hard disk, they keep the file that was replaced, but change its filename extension to .001 (or .002 if .001 already exists, and so on). You can delete these if you know that the old version will never be needed again, but this can be a dangerous area — the QSound plug‑in for Sound Forge writes a hidden file called Dkmtu.000, and if you delete this you lose an install. Be careful!
Windows 95 often seems to leave things in the Windows\spool\printers folder: this holds files that you have printed, but Windows doesn't always clear them out after printing is completed. Anything found in here can normally be deleted. If you use the Internet, your browser will probably have a cache of several megabytes. This is used to store recently used pages and graphics — to speed things up if the same pages are required again. You can purge these periodically from an option in the browser itself, although their total size will never grow beyond the size you've chosen for the cache.
People who blindly press the 'OK' button when an installation folder is suggested often end up with hard disk contents resembling tribal totem poles.
There are many other types of files that you could probably whittle away at, to give you a bit more hard disk space, but on a musician's machine, multimedia files are the gluttons: it's often quite easy to free up tens of megabytes at a stroke by removing unwanted audio and video files. Many software packages provide helpful tutorials — Sound Forge is one example; during installation it places a 5Mb batch of WAV files in its folder. If you have looked at these tutorials, they can safely be deleted. After all, most of today's software is now supplied on CD‑ROM, so the files will still be there if you need to refer to them again. The only downside here is that most programs supplied on floppy disk (as well as certain CD‑ROMs) hold their data in compressed format, only expanding it when you install the software. In such cases, you may have to re‑install the software to get the tutorial files back. Any WAV or MID files supplied for demo purposes with sequencers, audio editors, and soundcards can also be deleted if you don't use them.
On the video side, some packages install multimedia tutorials on your hard disk, which, more often than not, have filenames ending in AVI. These tend to be huge but, thankfully, many manufacturers now leave them on the CD‑ROM to be run directly, providing a Start Menu shortcut that prompts you to place the correct disk in your CD‑ROM drive. Another example of wasted space is 'cosmetic' backdrops and designer screensavers. Although some packages come with screensavers advertising the company (these will have an SCR suffix and can be quickly disposed of), other glamorous packages include whole suites of designer backdrops for you to use as wallpaper when running the application. The latest version of Norton Utilities comes with a 1Mb selection of 14 designer styles, ranging from fluffy clouds, through hi‑tech metal and marble, to a particularly natty walnut finish — just right for personalising your programs! Although it's nice to have these options, once you've chosen a personalised colour scheme, it's silly to leave the rest of the options on your drive: the most popular graphics formats to investigate here are BMP and GIF.
We Have The Technology
Although you can do all this trimming by hand, using Find for each category of file, there are several programs that can automate the process. WinDelete is excellent value, CleanSweep is very comprehensive, and Norton Utilities provides the Space Wizard, which has an interesting additional feature. Although it can take a long time, it will compare the contents of identically sized files to find duplicates, even if they have different names. This produced several surprises on my machine, including two graphics files belonging to First Aid 95 that, despite having different filenames, were identical. However, you still have to be careful if you're deleting one of any pair of duplicate files, since if they have different filenames you're likely to get a 'Missing File' error next time an associated program calls them.
Removing Old Programs
Although removing programs by hand is far easier to do if you've previously installed a program into its own unique folder, many initialisation files and Windows system files are dropped into unexpected places on your hard disk, and these can be very difficult to track down. Also, the Registry is still likely to contain various references to the program, which are best removed by an automated utility. If you have ever used a dedicated uninstall program such as WinDelete, UnInstaller or CleanSweep, you will never want to return to the old ways of attempting to remove files by hand (see the CleanSweep 3.0 review on page 118). If applications do provide their own uninstall option, this will often look for an associated Install.log file that was created during installation, so leave any log files well alone. Thankfully, most recent programs seem far better at removing themselves — using their own uninstall routines — than they were in the past, some even providing a reassuring check list of what they're currently doing. If any uninstall program leaves the program folder behind after deleting the program files, this is probably because there are still files in it saved after the Install.log was created, such as your data or preference settings. Have a look with a text editor, and then delete them along with the folder itself if you're happy that nothing of value remains.
Cleaning The Registry
For many people, the Registry is an area shrouded in mystery, despite many references to it, and remains a no‑go area. It first appeared in Windows 95, and was designed to streamline the approach used in Windows 3.1, which used individual INI files for each and every application. Although Windows 95 still recognises INI files used by 16‑bit applications, most 32‑bit native Windows 95 versions incorporate equivalent data within the Registry. Grouping all the information in this way not only makes it easier to maintain a full backup in the event of system failure, but also allows different users to have their own set of preferences. Each PC will have its own unique Registry, and this is first created when you install Windows 95. It consists of two hidden files: SYSTEM.DAT holds the hardware‑ and computer‑specific data, and USER.DAT holds the entries relating to the individual user.
During the installation procedure, Windows 95 builds up a database of what hardware you have in your PC. It does the same as each subsequent piece of software or hardware is installed. Having full details of system hardware and software gives it a much better chance of spotting hardware incompatibilities, driver errors and so on. Unfortunately, this level of sophistication means that any editing of the Registry should not be undertaken unless you know exactly what you want to change, and have detailed instructions on how to do it. I've had six pieces of software published over the years, and am currently on my fourth PC, but I still steer clear of fiddling about with the Registry. By all means try the published tweaks to the Registry that appear in magazines and application help files, but don't underestimate the damage that can be done if anything goes wrong. Always make a backup of the Registry before changing a value. If the worst happens, and your machine freezes next time you boot it up, you can recover by manually restoring the old version of the Registry.
The main difficulty is that a single piece of software may have a dozen or more references within the Registry, all in different places. Changing or removing two or three of them may leave your system with a permanent 'limp', which might only be resolved by completely re‑installing Windows 95. The easiest way to approach the Registry is to use one of the semi‑automatic maintenance programs provided with WinProbe95, First Aid 95, and CleanSweep 3. These trawl through the Registry looking for references to programs that no longer exist on your hard drive. With the amount of software that goes in and out of my machine, I tend to run one of these once every month or two. Even so, the references it comes up with (see screenshot) will mean little to most people, and it's still worth backing up the Registry before allowing the program to remove these entries, just in case. You've probably guessed by now that I think this area is a bit of a minefield. Editing the Registry is sometimes the only way to change certain aspects of the system, and I suspect that this was why Microsoft released Tweak UI (see the 'Power Toys' box): to allow people to perform the commonest system tweaks from the comfort of a point‑and‑click interface.
Installing New Software
When you're installing new applications, rather than accepting the suggested default destination folder, it's well worth spending a little time coming up with a approach that'll make finding your files easier in the future. People who blindly press the 'OK' button when an installation folder is suggested often end up with hard disk contents resembling tribal totem poles. This is because of the vast number of applications that prefer to create a new folder in the root (C:\) directory; better applications at least place themselves inside the existing 'Program Files' folder, and leave the root folder uncluttered.
Everybody will evolve their own approach, but on my system I like to keep documents and MIDI stuff in their own separate folders, and so have created two folders in the root directory called DOCUMENT and MIDI. Inside the DOCUMENT folder live all my SOS articles and reviews, personal and business letters, accounts and so on, each in their own sub‑folders. The big advantage of separating out the documents (rather than allowing them to pile up by default in several word‑processor or database folders), is that you can then back up the entire DOCUMENT folder on a regular basis without having to separate out any program files. Having regular backups is also a godsend if any of your files ever get corrupted or accidentally deleted.
By all means try published tweaks to the Registry which appear in magazines and application help files, but don't underestimate the damage that can be done if anything goes wrong.
In my MIDI folder, each main application has its own separate folder within; data files end up in the MUSIC folder, and the smaller programs all end up in a folder labelled UTILITY. Again, the advantage of this approach is that as and when you get an upgrade or a new version of a particular program, you know instantly where the old one lives, which makes it far easier to dispose of it if you don't have a dedicated uninstall program. A useful technique is to choose a folder name containing the version number of the application, for example 'Cubase20' for Cubase version 2.0. Then when you install a new version, it's easy to see which is which, if you need to manually remove the bulk of the files used by the old version to release hard disk space. Always use a new folder filename when you're installing an updated application — putting it in an existing folder 'over the top' of the previous one is tempting providence, to say the least!
There are several schools of thought on the cleanest way to deal with a major software upgrade. Until recently, I always preferred to leave the previous version on the hard disk until the new one had been checked out, as manufacturers have an annoying habit of removing old features when adding new ones. This also gives you a chance to double‑check that any personal preferences, colour schemes and data files are copied across to the new folder before you delete the contents of the old one. However, with the arrival of uninstall utilities (which are far more thorough at removing every reference to the previous version), you may end up uninstalling a few system files common to both versions, which the newer version still needs.
Just ignoring the old version that's still on your hard disk may cause you a lot of head‑scratching later, if you ever accidentally boot up the old version of the program without realising it. Various DLL files in the Windows System folder will probably have been updated by the newer version and, while well‑written programs tend to maintain compatibility as they evolve, there's no guarantee that an older program will function properly with system files rewritten for the newer version. Probably the best solution when installing a major upgrade is to double‑check that you've saved any preference files into a temporary directory (for subsequent use by the new version), and then run your uninstall to give you a clean slate before installing the new version.
Organising The Start Menu
The easiest way to make day‑to‑day PC navigating easier is to organise your Start menu. Rather than leaving the host of root entries that appear by default, re‑arrange them into several new folders and you'll end up with an easily navigated selection (see Figure 4), which makes it easy to launch any application without wading through a huge list of entries. You can edit the Start menu either through Explorer (in the Windows\Start Menu folder), or arrive at the same place by selecting Settings, then Taskbar, from the Taskbar itself (see Figure 5). Most people prefer to have an entry for each application in the Start menu, but create shortcuts only on the Desktop for the most frequently used applications. Probably the quickest way to add a desktop shortcut is while you're editing the Start menu — simply right‑click and drag an icon from a Start menu folder, and then drop it on the desktop, and select the Create Shortcut Here option.
Conclusion
Some people still prefer not to bother about adopting a more careful regime during program installation and day‑to‑day use, ending up with bloated hard drives and often unnecessarily sluggish performance as well. There is a remedy, although it's somewhat more drastic and time‑consuming, and not for the squeamish. Back up all your data, reformat the hard disk, then reinstall Windows 95, and all of your applications, finally restoring your data files from the backup. Although this sounds a bit frightening, and takes some hours to do, I certainly know some people who work this way: they start from scratch several times each year, whenever, as they put it, 'things start to go flaky'. I've never had to resort to this method, although I have had to reinstall Windows 95 over the top of itself three or four times to recover from small inexplicable problems, probably caused by badly behaved installations (or my fiddling with the Registry!). I much prefer to try to keep things a little more organised in the first place. It's a bit like having a library — in an organised PC, when you want to find something, at least you know the right shelf to start looking on. I've seen other people's PCs that resemble nothing more than a huge mountain of books piled up in the middle of the room. Everything is in there — somewhere!
Favourite Folders
One thing that makes day‑to‑day work more pleasurable is making sure that, when you open or save a file from an application, the default directory is where you like to store files associated with that program. There are several ways to do this, depending on the program. Many allow you to specify it in the 'Start In' entry of Properties (right‑click on the Shortcut to the program to find this, either on a desktop shortcut or a shortcut when editing the Taskbar). Others have an entry in the appropriate INI file, with a default folder, accessed either through a preferences menu in the program itself, or, failing this, by editing the INI file directly using something like Notepad. This may sound complicated, but it only has to be done once, and it's a good feeling when you want to load a file and the correct folder always opens up automatically.
When I Were A Lad
People whose PC experience stretches as far back as the DOS era may well have more ordered ways of dealing with folders. In those halcyon days of text‑only screens (like those you still see when first booting up your PC), only 25 lines of text normally appeared on screen before the topmost rapidly scrolled out of sight, never to return. To make things easier to read, the general rule was to try to have no more than 25 entries in any one folder, so that its entire contents could be viewed on screen at once. This may sound laughable now, but there's some sense in this philosophy, as you will probably appreciate when scrolling through a typical Windows folder with its hundreds of entries.
Cleansweep 3.0 Review
When I was writing 'Essential Accessories for the PC Musician' for April '97's SOS, I mentioned CleanSweep v3.0 in the text, but it arrived a month later than promised and missed the deadline, so it was actually the previous CleanSweep 95 that I reviewed, and which appeared in the screenshot. To save any confusion, the packaging of the version 3 is shown here — do make sure that you get this one, as there are significant improvements. Once again, its main claim to fame is the ability to monitor the installation of applications. It not only records a full list of new files added to your computer, but also notes any overwriting of existing files with older versions, and any alterations to existing INI files such as adding or deleting lines, as well as recording any changes to the Registry. What this means in practice is that whether the new application provides its own uninstall facility or not, if you want to remove it, CleanSweep will exactly reverse the process, not only removing every single file associated with the application, but also removing all traces of it elsewhere.
The beauty of this technology is that it happens automatically — CleanSweep sits in the background, and when you run any Setup or Install it will pop up to ask if you wish to monitor the installation. This new version even copes with programs that insist on re‑booting the machine to finish their installation — popping up again to let you save its install log when your PC returns to the desktop. Quite frankly, without this program I would rarely try out 'cover‑mounted' CD‑ROM software, and it would certainly be a nightmare removing review software when the associated hardware goes back to the distributor.
New features include Safety Sweep (which prevents you deleting any questionable files unless you specifically ask it to give you full control), Update‑It (which can automatically download the latest version of CleanSweep over the Internet for you), and Registry Genie (a safer way to edit the Registry, if you're feeling brave). The far more useful Registry Sweep cleans up your Registry by removing redundant references, and a new and improved knowledge base of 1000 applications allows much more thorough removal of pre‑CleanSweep‑monitored applications, now the program knows what files are involved. The graphics have been tweaked, and you can now easily view logs to check what actually happened during an installation. Although this new version took up 15Mb on my system as opposed to 5Mb for the previous version, it's so useful that I won't grumble. CleanSweep 3.0 is available from most software outlets, and the street price is about £40.
Power Toys
If you don't already have these (and there are numerous copies on the cover disks provided with many computer magazines), they are well worth installing, particularly the Tweak UI option. This provides an extra applet in Control Panel, allowing you to tweak many aspects of Windows 95 that would otherwise only be accessible by directly editing the Registry. For instance, you can get rid of all those little arrows that appear on Shortcut icons, and speed up the menus that cascade from the Taskbar (Menu Speed). These default to waiting about a second before displaying the next menu, and this feels to me like walking through treacle. The Documents section on the Start menu allows you to quickly open a document you've worked on recently by clicking on it. If you currently have a huge list of file entries in the Documents section, you can arrange for this to be cleared automatically every time you boot up (in the Paranoia section!). There are also several repair functions that can be useful. Although there's no help file as such, you can click on the question mark at the top of the dialogue box, and then get an explanation for each option by clicking on it. Considering that Microsoft provide the Power Toys free of charge, they are an absolute bargain!