Keeping your computer fast with Defraggler, and CCleaner

Posted on Sep 3, 2008 by Paul White

There are several things that can hurt your computers performance.  Some of these like viruses and spyware can drag your computer to its knees. But if your computer is clean, and still running slow there are other reasons.

Disk Drive is Full

If your hard drive is over 70% full, it might be time to clean it up, or if all your data is good, to upgrade it to a larger drive.  Once hard drives get beyond 70% capacity there is a huge performance drop.  This is a very common problem with my client's computers.  They are usually running a hard drive that is just a few megs from being full.  Once I move their data to a larger drive, everything moves fast again.

Dist Drive is full of log files and temp files.

If you spend alot of time on the internet, the chance is every graphic and video you have watched is cached to your local hard drive.  There are ways to remove these within IE and firefox, but even better is a program called CCleaner.  This program does a great job of finding all the temp files and Cache files from your system and removes them.  It also have a nice tool that cleans up your registry, and this can speed things up a bit too.  I have used this program on all 5 of my VPS boxes, and my own workstation.  To say the least it has worked flawlessly, and I have never had any problems with it.

Hard Drive is Fragmented

Even though windows has a built in Defragmentation tool. In my opinion it doesn't do a very good job.  Hence the reason there are so many third party applications for this purpose.  Defraggler is a free program that does an excellent job.  Not only does it defragment your hard drive but it will also show you what files where fragmented and how badly.  Plus it also allows you to defrag individual files rather than the entire drive.  I also run this program on all my VPS boxes plus my workstation.  After running it there is a definate performance gain.  Highly recommend it to everyone.

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