Cleaning Puter

[53flyingcloud]

Recently, all of this info coming out about internet security on your puter lead me to this site for a program which, I felt should be shared with all of you folks out there. It's free as well..
http://www.stevengould.org/software/cleanup/
I've used this program now for a week now with great results.
I'd say this: read all of the info concerning it's use first before you downoad and run it. (backup ur files, etc.)
It has cleaned a huge amount of wasted puter space back for use. (In my case over almost 600 mgs of files were cleaned.)
If you do decide to try it..
I'd like to hear feedbacks as to any pro and con..
ciao
53FC

[xFieldTech]

Hi All,

I recommend caution before downloading and installing any free applications but especially those designed to perform system cleaning or other maintenance tasks. There's a great deal of malware lurking on the internet, much of it under the guise of 'system cleaners', 'registry-cleaners', and the like. For these types of applications, I strongly recommend using known, commercially available, and reputable utilities from companies such as Symantec, McAfee, or Web Root. Even if the freeware app isn't malicious in nature, it probably doesn't come with the same level of vendor support as the commercial variety (especially if something goes wrong).

As a network administrator (elective track in security) and as an IT consultant, I see a lot of machines that have been compromised by the actions of their owners. When it comes to system maintenance related software, you very often get what you pay for.

Glenn

[azflycaster]

I agree with Glenn 150%. As an IT professional I see more problems then anything else caused by 'free' products. I have no knowledge of the product mentioned, my comments are of a general nature. Many of the freeware products I have seen contain spyware or adware. The creator of the software is getting paid by the back door. Part of my job is to evaluate, purchase and deploy tools to keep the desktops safe at my company. My personal favorites are Symantec Antivirus and Microsoft Anti Spyware (Beta).

[swebster]

Me too! Spend the money on brand name software (Microsoft, Apple, Norton, Synantec, etc.)

There is a nice (free) AntiSpyware solution from MS (http://www.microsoft.com/athome/secu...e/default.mspx). We've been using it in our office for a while and it's working well.

[Chuck]

another Network admin chiming in. I agree, in general....except I've had good luck w/ adaware and spybot, both free. they don't get everything. there's another one that you don't even have to install that you can run from a webpage: www.spywareinfo.com

If I run into trouble at my office, I'll run these 3 first. gets 99% of it. OTOH, I don't spend a whole lot of time on it. if a machine is too far screwed up, I'll just image the damn thing and have a "clean" workstation in 10 minutes. but, sometimes the users don't like this solution, as they've stored tons of personal stuff on what they think is "their" computer. (its not YOURS; its MINE. I (speaking for the boss, here) just let you use it).

Interesting about the ms "anti-spyware" program....Shouldn't that come in the form of a patch, since its their own programming faults that make this whole thing possible, in the first place????

oh, well. keeps me employed. if it just "worked" like its supposed to, I guess I wouldn't have a job, now, would I?

[Stefrobrts]

Do any of you IT pros have a recommendation for software to 'clean up' my harddrive? Seems to me every app you install shoves something new in the registry, until now my computer is a bloated repository of unused programs. Although I uninstall programs I don't use, my computer now spends about five minutes booting up, and I have no way of knowing what it's loading during that time. There's nothing in the start-up folder. I've got the spyware under control, it's just some general houskeeping I could use!

[azflycaster]

I have used a microsoft utility called RegClean. I don't think Microsoft supports it anymore, but it has worked for me on all MS OS's through Win2K. It removes all registry entries that do not have the files to support them. It also creates a xxx.reg file that will restore the registry changes that it makes. I alway recomend (but don't always do) that the registry is backed up before you use any tool like this. You can find a copy here:http://www.majorgeeks.com/download458.html

[markdoane]

Stephanie,

I like Fix-It utilities. It's available at www.v-com.com for a reasonable price. It has a registry cleanup, anti-virus (seems to update every other day), diagnostics, de-frag and a bunch of other utils. I also run spybot for spyware.

It's put out by a subsidiary of Kroll Ontrack Inc.

[xFieldTech]

I'm with Chuck when it comes re-imaging a system; our policy at work is if you can't fix it in 15 minutes then re-image the box.

This works well for home users also...rather than spend time and money on programs to clean a system (not to mention labor if you have it professionally done...major $$$), invest in a good backup app like Norton Ghost and an external hard-drive. Throughly back up your data then format and do a fresh installation of the operating system and applications such as Word, Excel, etc. When you have it tweaked just the way you like it, make an image of the system and put it on the external drive. This now becomes your master copy. Put your data back on your system (preferably on a different partition on the disk). Now anytime your system begins to slow down or in any way act funny, re-image from the master copy and and your back up and running. You should also periodically image the data partition of your drive to keep it current; just be sure to maintain separate operating system and data images.

I realize this sounds like a lot to do but it really isn't that complicated. There are lots of resources available that describe this process. The key is to keep good backups.

[Silvertwinkie]

Originally Posted by xFieldTech

I'm with Chuck when it comes re-imaging a system; our policy at work is if you can't fix it in 15 minutes then re-image the box.

Ditto on that.

[53flyingcloud]

Originally Posted by Stefrobrts

Do any of you IT pros have a recommendation for software to 'clean up' my harddrive? Seems to me every app you install shoves something new in the registry, until now my computer is a bloated repository of unused programs. Although I uninstall programs I don't use, my computer now spends about five minutes booting up, and I have no way of knowing what it's loading during that time. There's nothing in the start-up folder. I've got the spyware under control, it's just some general houskeeping I could use!

Stefrobrts:
I used to have that very same level of frustration with mine as well.
While most of the "IT Pro" on here seem to go for a back-ups and/or re-imagery of the harddrive. Nothing wrong with that..
I prefer to fix the problem at hand.
The CleanUp! program mention has works for me. It may not be the answer to all of your problems.
For years I've used a program call Registry Detective with excellent results for removing trash but..It's not something for everyone, as any mistake made using it can be as dangerous as the old deltree cmd.
ciao
53FC

[Silvertwinkie]

As a seasoned "IT" pro, the reality is that most of the time the problems when a user has full admin privs is that the end user 9 times out of 10 was the root cause of the issue. They either went to a site and caught something or they installed something they couldn't verify the source and the box just either goes BOOM or it slowly grinds to a halt.

Most IT folks in recent years have started to pull all system level rights from the end user. We did it 8 years ago. Our incident rate nearly hit zero and for the life of me, I can't understand why?!

We may at some point have a 1 to 1 laptop program, and with that, we have been fairly clear that we will NOT troubleshoot more than 10 minutes to verify it is not a hardware issue. This is due to the fact that folks would again have admin rights to the workstation. After that, no matter what is on the machine, it gets the standard image and it will be up to the end user to backup their documents, music, etc. Until that day though, admin rights are set to zero and will remain at that level for both our Mac and PC users, no exceptions.

Of course when you are home, have admin rights to your own box, extreme caution, particularly if you run PC should be taken to avoid the nasty little things that add spice to all of our lives. Which can be, but not limited to, stealing music from an unknown source, running Windows file sharing, not updating your machine, not having your firewall on, not having Anti-Virus software and/or making sure it stays up to date, opening attachments you have no idea who they are from, etc.

[azflycaster]

Most IT folks in recent years have started to pull all system level rights from the end user.

We have limited local administrators to a handful of techs. Only IT staff and only half of them have these rights. Everyone else is a poweruser. We tried user level, but had too many problems with many of the apps. The sad fact is, a poweruser can cause enough damage to his/her workstation to justify a new image via Symantec Ghost

[Chuck]

yep, we found that it caused more trouble than it solved, too. Mainly, our "reason for existance" (autocadd) insists on writing to HKLM in order to run. .
what's that? it can't be a "windows compliant" application, then.

autodesk's answer: too bad. you can use the other industry standard drafting program. oops, that's right, there isn't one.

its good to be the king.....I guess

[azflycaster]

Originally Posted by chuck

yep, we found that it caused more trouble than it solved, too. Mainly, our "reason for existance" (autocadd) insists on writing to HKLM in order to run. .
what's that? it can't be a "windows compliant" application, then.

autodesk's answer: too bad. you can use the other industry standard drafting program. oops, that's right, there isn't one.

its good to be the king.....I guess

Don't get me started with AutoDesk products. A new version every month, compatability issues and pay for terrible support. I think AutoCadd 2010 comes out next month.

[Silvertwinkie]

I feel for ya. We have a few issues with a handful of programs, we still can limit the user's admin rights in general and with command line (I know it's not what it's cracked up to be in the windows world), grant read right to the application if it has to read to the local drive. Allows the user to blow up the app, but only the app. We also have a few that just won't play nice and refuse to write to a remote directory....thank goodness those apps are not "mission critical".

Quark and Microsoft are very similar to your drafting program. Quark more than Microsoft, but for Microsoft for Mac, they wanted $80 per call, even though they wrote the code wrong. A few months later they fixed it, but we found it and wrote our own terminal patch that made it work right.

One thing that I recently noticed is that my PC IT counterparts have simialr problems that we Mac folks do running user management (restricted system access) running some apps.

For years I thought that it was only a Mac thing, but up until about a year ago, found that we all shovel the same B.S., we just use a different shovel!

[Stefrobrts]

Sounds like reimaging is the way to go. I was going to get ghost and upgrade to a bigger harddrive anyway. Then I'll have the old harddrive as an extra for saving a clean image to. What a pain to reload everything though! I know I'll be missing something when I get done, and won't discover it until a really inconvenient time. Oh well, I guess I better start rounding up the software install disks.

My main problem is that I really like this laptop even though it's a couple years old now. I don't usually have a problem because with the desktop systems we upgrade every couple years and start fresh, but this little laptop is still pulling it's weight just fine. It's always hard to decide if it's better to upgrade the system you have or go for a new box entirely.

[Buttercup]

On my PC's I use Crap Cleaner (http://www.ccleaner.com/).


Cleans the following:
Internet Explorer
Temporary files, URL history, cookies, Autocomplete form history, index.dat.


Firefox
Temporary files, URL history, cookies, download history.


Windows
Recycle Bin, Recent Documents, Temporary files and Log files.


Registry cleaner
Advanced features to remove unused and old entries, including File Extensions, ActiveX Controls, ClassIDs, ProgIDs, Uninstallers, Shared DLLs, Fonts, Help Files, Application Paths, Icons, Invalid Shortcuts and more... also comes with a comprehensive backup feature.


Third-party applications
Removes temp files and recent file lists (MRUs) from many apps including Opera, Media Player, eMule, Kazaa, Google Toolbar, Netscape, MS Office, Nero, Adobe Acrobat, WinRAR, WinAce, WinZip.



It does a fantastic job, cleaning about 100 mb plus each time I use it.