multifarious mushrooms

Since I’ve had my Firefox problem, which still exists, I’ve learnt a few things about cleaning up computers.

Firstly, the Add/Remove function in Windows does not remove all the data in that application. You have probably noticed that. So people use a third party uninstallers. Your uninstaller 2008 was recommended but that cost, so I found a free one by searching for uninstallers and used that. It implanted a Yahoo toolbar so you have to be careful about these programs. I have since deleted that toolbar.

Of course, lots of stuff is left in the registry too. I had never touched registries before. For this there is the free ccleaner and it’s really very good. You can use it to remove programs too and get rid of files left in the registry to do with those programs. I freed up quite a bit of space. Spybot will detect changes to the registry but you just say okay to that.

For my other cleaning up computer ideas you can see this on my site.

Someone also told me about Mozbackup, since one idea was to uninstall Firefox and then reinstall it. Unfortunately for me, the files backed up were corrupted, so use it while firefox is working properly. You can backup all your bookmarks, passwords etc.

So much backing up, I also bought a 2G USB memory stick.

At the same time all this was happening, and stopping me from blogging, my monitor went on the blink. There was a power outage and the monitor started behaving badly. I pulled all the plugs, vacuumed the hard disk, and tried it again. No luck. I tried the monitor of my partners. That one worked. Logically it was a dead monitor on my computer. I took the hard drive and monitor to my computer place. They tested it and it was the monitor. So I had to buy a new one. The cheapest was still 2″ bigger than the one I had before.

Another very useful application to clean up computers is to use a noclone program which will detect all files which are identical. You can then delete what you don’t want. Also get rid of most of your zipped files. You don’t need them anymore. Just run *.zip in your Start>Search. Some of them will be associated with programs you may not want to delete and some of them may be your own.

Posted on June 3rd, 2008 under computers • RSS 2.0 feed • Leave a response, or trackback