How to give a tired old PC a spring clean

OVER TIME AND WITH USE, desktop computers gradually fill up with crap. It's a fact of life. The best way of dealing with it is to regularly back up your data and periodically wipe the hard disk and reinstall the OS and apps, then put your data back. The snag is, this is such a big job that nobody ever wants to do it, so it only gets done when you have to - if the hard disk dies or you get infested with malware or something.

But there are a couple of fairly quick and easy steps you can take you get some of the junk off a Windows box. Forget Microsoft's cleanup wizards or the many third-party tools - run 'em if you like, but they're so cautious they tend not to do much good.

These steps are pretty much safe and will work on any PC running Windows 2000 or newer. As usual, though, if you get it wrong and lose everything and you haven't done a backup since 1996, it's not our fault and we're not taking the blame.

Step 1. Start with a clean slate
Close everything. All your apps, your chat clients, the lot. If you can exit it, do, including all those little icons in the system tray down by the clock. If you want to be extra-thorough, reboot the PC before proceeding and then close anything that runs automatically.

Step 2. Use the right tools
Open up an Explorer window. I recommend the real, hierarchical Explorer, not just the pane-by-pane view. Go into Tools | Options and make sure that it's showing all files, hidden or not, and not hiding file extensions.

Tip: The quick way to open Explorer is to press Windows+E. To show all files, pick Tools | Folder Options, then go to the View tab. Tick the line that says “Show hidden files and folders”.

Step 3. Find the mess you're going to clear up
Go into drive C: or whatever drive Windows is installed on. Look for the "Documents and Settings" folder. Open that up by clicking the little plus sign to its left.

Now look for your own user account folder. You ought to at least know who you're logging on as. It could be your name, it could be "Administrator" (Roll up! Roll up! Come and see the amazing Windows security hole!), it could say "Default User" or almost anything.

If you really don't know, or you have lots of users, go through them all. You can probably safely ignore "All Users". Nothing relevant to this tends to ever happen in there.

Tip: One way to find out which one you are currently is to open a command prompt - if you're logged in as "Alice", say, your current directory - shown in the prompt - should be something like "C:Documents and SettingsAlice>"

Once you've identified which folder you're looking for, click its little plus sign. Look for a subfolder called "Local settings". Open it up. In there, you should find one called "Temp". Open it up.

And behold the mountains of rubbish that Windows and its apps are meant to clean up and usually forget to. Your personal temp folder's probably full of hundreds of directories and thousands of files, none of which you need.

Step 4. Spring cleaning
Delete the lot.

Yes, really. This is all detritus, waste that's left behind by opening or saving email attachments, cutting and pasting and all that sort of thing. You can live without it. Just bin the lot.

Note that in all likelihood, some of the files will still be in use and can't be deleted. You just have to work around those ones.

Tip: If you're competent at a DOS prompt - and if you're not, hand in your techie card and go become a manager or something - you can save yourself a lot of time by going to the DOS prompt, changing directory to the temp folder and doing the old del star-dot-star. I'm not going to give any more instructions than that in case some idiot who doesn't know what they're doing wrecks their system. Windows will just let you. It's like that.

Step 5. Look under the rug
Now, go to the "WINDOWS" directory - the one in the root directory. Be really careful in here; put one foot wrong, you'll nuke your PC. You'll find another folder called "Temp" in there, too. Once again, bin everything in the Temp folder.

Step 6. Make sure you've not thrown the baby out by mistake
I'm being paranoid here. If you know what you're doing, skip this bit. Reboot your PC and check it seems to work and that your data is all there.

If it isn't, use the Recycle Bin's "Restore" option to but back anything you didn't mean to bin.

If it is, good! Empty the bin. Kiss your trash goodbye.

Step 7. Check your disks for health
Time for a sanity check. This bit may take a while, I warn you.

Now, first, do you know how many actual drive letters your PC has? I don't mean things like floppies, CD or DVDs, card readers, stuff like that. I mean actual hard disks or hard disk partitions. Usually everyone's got a C: drive but I have seen weirdly-set-up PCs where there's only a drive F: or M: or something, coming after all the removable media.

Grab a bit of scrap paper, note down all the real drives. Maybe you've got C: for Windows and D: for data or backups - because you always do your backups, don't you?

Once you have this list, open up a command prompt and type, very carefully:

CHKDSK /F drive letter complete with colon

... then press Enter or Return. Doesn't matter which. It's short for "check disk". So to check drive C, you type, with no quotation marks around it, "CHKDSK /F C:" and for drive D you type "CHKDSK /F D:" and so on.

When you press Return, Windows will come back and tell you that the drive is in use and that it can't do it right now, and would you like to do it when the system reboots instead? Answer "yes" to this by typing "y" and pressing Return again.

Beforehand, it might ask you if you'd like it to try to forcibly unmount the disk first. Say no to this - it's slightly risky and it's not worth it.

Do this once for each "Local disk" or whatever your copy of Windows calls 'em. Don't bother doing it for optical drives, it won't work. It will work on Flash memory cards and things - but obviously only if they're in the drive at the time. Do it if you wish, but it probably won't help much and will just take longer.

Once you've typed in a CHKDSK command for each hard disk or partition, type EXIT and return to close the command prompt window, or just use the mouse and close it as normal.

Now, reboot your PC.

When it restarts, it will probably sit there for an age displaying inscrutable messages about how many files and blocks and things are in use on your drives. Relax and enjoy the show. If you have big disks, especially if they're fairly full, it could be there for quarter of an hour or more. Hours or days is very rare except on big servers, but don't do this when you're in a hurry. It will get there in its own sweet time.

When it's finished, it will come up with the Windows welcome screen as usual, or if you have it set to log in automatically, it'll do that.

Step 8. Better safe than sorry
Reboot it again, but this time, start in Safe Mode.

If you don't know about Safe Mode, it's a pretty handy thing. It loads up Windows without all the usual startup programs, drivers and everything. You wouldn't want to use your PC like this - for instance, you'll have no Internet access - but it's handy for when a Windows install is so completely hosed that it can't start normally and just crashes or hangs.

To get into Safe Mode, as soon as your PC beeps to indicate it's done its power-on self-test, press F8. You're aiming to do this before the "Loading Windows" screen appears!

If you don't hit the key in time, the PC will boot normally. Wait for it to finish, reboot and try again.

If you did get to the F8 button in time, a little menu appears, offering a choice of startup modes: Safe mode, Safe mode with command prompt, Safe mode with networking, Normal startup and so forth. Just pick plain old Safe mode with the arrow keys and Return.

Wait a while - it will probably take longer to start this way than usual and you'll see reams of messages flying past as it does - and if necessary log in like normal.

When it gets to the Windows desktop, it will be in a lower resolution than normal and will say "Safe mode" in the corners.

Tip: This bit isn't essential. If you can't get into Safe mode, don't worry too much about it. All it means is that the next step will go faster and do a more thorough job, but you can still proceed in normal mode if you can't use Safe mode for some reason.

Step 9. Sort your files out
Go to the Start menu, go to "Programs" or "All programs" depending on how you have it configured, go to "Accessories", then to "System Tools" and choose "Disk Defragmenter". Alternatively, if you're a good typist, press Windows-R, type DEFRAG and press Return.

Once the defragmenter runs, you get a list of all the available drives at the top of the window. Pick the first one and click the bit "defragment" button. Go off and have dinner or something; if you've never done this before, it could take hours.

Red stuff is all chewed up; blue is all sorted and consecutive. Green represents special magic Windows bits the defragger can't touch. What you're aiming for is the "after" display to be all nice soothing blues and greens and no nasty reds. You may need to defrag a drive several times to chase out lingering traces of red; how often you do it depends on your level of patience. This is only a free defragger, so you have to do some of the legwork. There are better commercial ones that do this bit for you.

Repeat the process for every hard drive or partition on your machine.

Once you're done, reboot again to get out of Safe Mode.

Step 10. Enjoy
That's about as much as can readily be done to cheer up a tired old PC without starting to get mediaeval on its backplane and uninstalling programs and so on. Don't expect a dramatic transformation, but at the end of this nine-step plan, you should have more disk space and a sprightlier, more responsive PC. Repeat on a regular basis to keep it that way.

And don't forget to backup your data regularly! µ