It may be too early for spring cleaning of your home, but it’s never too soon to clean your hard drive. Instead of buckets of detergent, squeegees and lint-free rags, the PC version, aptly named “Spring Cleaning,” will help you rid your PC of unneeded files, Internet detritus, stray Registry entries and other pesky files you don’t need and are probably responsible for slowing you to a crawl.
This program has been around the better part of a decade, yet it ran just fine on my Windows 7 system. After a quick install, you’re prompted to reboot. After that, you can go out and run a 10K or two while it scans your system and builds a database of everything on your hard drive. This is important, because one of its features is ferreting out duplicate files and folders.
The main program is divided among Internet, APPS (as in applications), Registry, Disk Cleaner and Size. You probably won’t use the latter, since today’s hard drives allow for huge folders anyway.
The Internet section lets you choose which cookies you want to delete and which you want to keep (some cookies actually do make your surfing a bit easier), and it cleans up your cache and browsing history. The Registry section will run a program that will find problems in the miles of computer code that make up your Registry files, repair them, clean up unneeded entries and, finally, for the brave, allow you to edit the registry.
An uninstall program will get rid of all files that program added to your hard drive, and you can actually move an application to a portable drive or another PC. If you change your mind about uninstalling a program, you can reinstall it using the Restore program.
There’s also a disk cleaner and duplicate file finder that can be customized to search out unique file extensions, such as temporary ones that were left over from application installations.
Many of these features are available from within Windows or your browser’s tools menu. Still, for people who prefer an easier way to handle cleanup chores, “Spring Cleaning” has all the utilities you need to do the job.
“Spring Cleaning” will run on all versions of Windows and Mac PCs. To order, send $15, plus $6 for shipping, to WashingtonCD, PO Box 351531, Los Angeles, Calif. 90035, or online at www.washingtoncd.net..
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