Chances are pretty good that if you're reading this blog, you use your computer quite a bit. Today I wanted to mention a nice freeware utility to help you manage your resources, CCleaner:
http://www.ccleaner.com
What is CCleaner? In their words:
"CCleaner is a freeware system optimization, privacy and cleaning tool. It removes unused files from your system - allowing Windows to run faster and freeing up valuable hard disk space. It also cleans traces of your online activities such as your Internet history. Additionally it contains a fully featured registry cleaner. But the best part is that it's fast (normally taking less than a second to run) and contains NO Spyware or Adware! :)"
That's a mouthful! Basically, it's free software that removes junk that accumulates in your file space and registry. If you run CCleaner, you might be surprised how much of aforementioned junk accumulates. I ran CCleaner last Sunday and it removed 700 MBs of temporary junk.
The registry cleaner is great, too. It's not recommended that you play games with your registry without a utility like this, unless you have a very good handle on what you're doing - a false step in the registry could mean an OS reinstall. And some of the junk that accumulates in your registry is non-trivial. E.g., while upgrading Ad-Aware, the upgrade process left an old Ad=Aware registry entry in place, not only being unnecessary, but actually causing Ad-Aware to simply not work. Clean up the registry, and you're in like Flynn.
There's two other nice utilities, as well, an Application uninstaller, and a memory manager which allows you to control what on your system is loaded at start up. The latter's nice, e.g., I want Windows Live on my PC, as an example, but I don't want it to launch on every start up. A lot of programs you want and install have a nasty habbit of doing this for you - problem solved.
The GUI is intuitive and the program itself is small and has a light footprint in memory. Others seem to agree that this is nice software:
http://www.ccleaner.com/reviews
So, if interested, you can download, here:
http://www.ccleaner.com/download
Personally, I can't recall life before using CCleaner.