Id: 53

I am an unabashed Linux user, but I am also a practical Linux user. I’ll occasionally fire up Windows (Vista, and shut up, it was included) on my laptop when the situation calls for it. Like tonight, trying to watch old episodes of Leverage online. Great show, but TNT’s video player has some wacky DRM thing and who knows what other problems, so that when I try to watch it in Firefox on Linux, it just winds up repeatedly refreshing the car ad on the side. Lexus therapy? But I digress…

Anyway, one of the really irritating things about Windows is that it leaves little droppings all over my hard drive — temporary files, old downloads, automatic updates, backup files, etc. etc. etc. And I do mean all over my hard drive; it’s not like Linux, where stray files only tend to accumulate in standard directories like /var/tmp so you can just rm -rdf in a few places and be pretty satisfied that you’ve got most of the junk. Windows is more like cleaning up the Exxon Valdez spill. For several months now I’ve been fighting a losing battle against the system for disk space, struggling to maintain even the minimum 300MB that Windows says it needs to function properly. And this is after I removed Starcraft (~400MB), Finale (~600MB), Magic Online (~900MB), and pretty much everything else that made Windows possibly worth keeping on my hard drive. And most of MS Office (shut up, it was included too) (~800MB). Launchy, we hardly knew ye.

The thing is, back when I partitioned my hard drive, Windows had something like 7 GB of free space on the drive to deal with. Considering that I’d removed almost everything I’d installed since then, I should be able to get those 7 GB back, although the way things were going, I couldn’t find any way to do that short of completely reinstalling Windows. What I needed was a really aggressive disk-cleaning program. Windows’ built-in Disk Cleanup tool, of course, had already deleted everything it could find. I tried Mz Ultimate Cleaner but it only tagged a couple of files totalling less than 2KB. I found a bunch of registry sweepers and shredders for removing traces of previously-deleted files — no help, of course. And then this post at Digital Inspiration sent me to CCleaner, which found — wait for it — 7.8 gigbytes of useless files to delete. I could free up a third of my entire Windows partition in one fell swoop! I wouldn’t be surprised if Windows takes up less disk space now than it did when the computer was new.

Bottom line, I am now running happily, thinking about how to reinstall some of my lost programs, and I highly recommend CCleaner. By all indications it’s the rm -rdf of Windows, a (probably) painless way to restore your computer’s disk space to a fairly pristine state. And Digital Inspiration seems pretty full of useful tips too, at least for Windows fans. Here’s another post I found tonight during post-mortem searching with exactly the advice I could have used 3+ months ago.

And whaddya know, I used up all my Leverage-watching time on this post. I need a program to clean my schedule…