Autumn (Computer) Cleaning

[Sazabi]

Several months past-due on my part, but currently I'm pruning old programs and files on my computer... let's see how much space I end up clearing off by the end of today, lol.

Are any of you taking similar hard drive pruning, intentionally, at least?  Hard drive failure doesn't count.

[Edit:  Aww, just 318.3 MB on CCleaner's first wipe (including Recycle Bin items I've just deleted for the pruning... I still have quite a bit of work to do. o.o;]

[NutSAK]

I spend quite a bit of time doing it but nothing like I used to.  At $70-$80/TB, hard drive space is cheap these days.

Maintenance like CCleaner I do weekly on all my systems.

[Sazabi]

I mean, I run CCleaner weekly, often more than even that, but I just dislike swamping hard drives with too much crap, especially of old files that I've not accessed in half a year. XD

[Freudian Frog]

Yup! Time to start cleaning!

[Mike, Lord of the Spammers!]

I dust the keyboard does that count

[Sazabi]

It does, kinda.   I need to take a can of compressed air and go through my keyboard some time... as for my hard drive, another 2 GB freed. ^_^

[John]

as for my hard drive, another 2 GB freed. ^_^

Excuse my ignorance but! where are the freed GB files freed too are they not still on your hard drive somewhere? 

[Whoey]

I just ran ccleaner on an office machine where the wife is working now... it hasn't been maintained since it was put into service in 2006, over 2gb of junk found, 1.2gb alone was IE cache files...

[Sazabi]

They're simply freed to the land of the lost bytes, where every byte from each floppy drive, fried hard drive, and innumerable Dells end up.  

I just ran ccleaner on an office machine where the wife is working now... it hasn't been maintained since it was put into service in 2006, over 2gb of junk found, 1.2gb alone was IE cache files...

Ouch, that sounds just like the first time I ran CCleaner on one of my father's older towers, as you said, 2GB of deleted crap, just as the other tower showed, too.  @_@

[Whoey]

and that was after I had already cleared out a big chunk of stuff manually...

[jzmtl]

I'm too lazy to do regular cleaning. Every couple of years I just wipe the hard drive clean and start over. 

[thebullfrog]

I just formatted my HD last week when I installed Windows 7. So I'm clean as a whistle over here  I have been slowly but surely going through and clearing out stuff I don't need on my "backup" HD though.

[Grant Lamontagne]

I'm interested in your thoughts on 7.  I have heard good things from many reliable sources.  I do like JZMTL and usually just reformat the computer once or twice a year, and my desktop is getting to be just about due.

Def

[Whoey]

I haven't had the need to reformat since installing ubuntu... upgraded several times without troubles.

I am considering a fresh start with 9.10 since I was also thinking might be a good time to go x64 and upgrade to 6 or 8GB ram

[thebullfrog]

I'm interested in your thoughts on 7.  I have heard good things from many reliable sources.  I do like JZMTL and usually just reformat the computer once or twice a year, and my desktop is getting to be just about due.

Def

I love it. It is very very good in many ways. I'm still getting used to the idiosynchrocies of the new task bar, but overall I find it to be a wonderful OS. The "librairies" are simply brilliant IMO, though for some reason media player refuses to see anything I add to my video library even though media center sees it just fine. Other than that one minor hiccup I have had zero issues thus far. I'm running Ultimate 64 bit and it runs very smooth and fast. It's the little things that really add up. Like how fast thumbnails load up, or how scary fast search runs now (I previously had Vista 32 bit). All the streamlining of the interface is very much welcome. Coming from Vista I find the evolutionary improvements to be amazing, and I'm in the minority that refused to ever use XP again after getting Vista. If you're coming from XP though you're in for one Hell of a learning curve. If you hated Vista on reputation alone I really think you should give 7 a try, if you actually bothered to spend the time to learn Vista and liked it, you'll be quite happy with 7. If you learned and used Vista and still hated it, well you'll most likely like 7 better than Vista, but keep in mind in many ways it is very very similar to Vista. Only infinitely better.

I haven't had the need to reformat since installing ubuntu... upgraded several times without troubles.

I am considering a fresh start with 9.10 since I was also thinking might be a good time to go x64 and upgrade to 6 or 8GB ram

I had to do a fresh install since I was going from 32 to 64 bit. Even if I hadn't I still would have done a reformat and fresh install. I just prefer a fresh OS install be as clean as possible. I've had problems with in place upgrades before. I used Ubuntu for a while. It had it's merits for sure, but I find using Linux to just be too big a hassle overall. Getting drivers working, compatability with games and other apps, it just gets old after a while. And I'm not doing a dual boot. If I have to boot into Windows half the time anyway, and reboot if I decide to stop doing "whatever" and load up Fallout 3 instead..it's just a pita and it's not worth the hassle. That being said, I did think Ubuntu was a pretty good OS overall once you learn it, just too much work for me to do my day to day activities.

[Whoey]

If there was better game support in Ubuntu, I'd wipe the Vista that came with my machine right off the system.

That being said, I booted into vista the other day for the first time in over 4 months... and spent half the bloody day installing updates.

[Grant Lamontagne]

I have XP on my desktop, Vista Home Basic on my laptop and a small build of Fedora called Linpus Lite on my netbook.  I have few, if any problems with any of them, and I don't really mind Vista at all.

What I don't like, and this is specific to my uses, is that each evolution of the OS does things more automatically.  Progress for the rest of the world perhaps, but I like the nuts and bolts of making things work.  Vista is very slick and nice, but I kinda like something I can work with.  

Def

[thebullfrog]

Yeah well 7 likes to do a lot of the hard work for you I'm afraid    What really strikes me is that I'm obsessive with customizing my OS. I used to spend hours tweaking Vista to within an inch of it's life. I used to screw around with XP till I broke it and had to start over lol. 7 just works. Period. I've dug around looking for things I wanna change, to improve, to adjust...and for the most part have come up dry. Everything I chage, I keep finding I actually like it better the way it was by default. I've made a few very minor changes using the Ultimate Windows Tweaker software, but nothing significant.

Upon installation almost everything worked without even needing to find drivers. Keep in mind this is on a laptop where many things like the audio, etc. need vendor/laptop specific drivers (like Gateway's painfully outdated driver for my 8800 GTS video card) and I had no internet connectivity at the time for it to try and find and download drivers on it's own (lost my WEP key for a while lol). Didn't matter. Upon first boot everything just worked. I updated my Video Card driver with a custom modified driver from Laptopvideo2go.com, installed the webcam driver, and well that was about it. When I reformatted after I first bought this comp to get rid of all Gateway's crapware and get a fresh install, it took me like 2 hours to get everything working correctly under Vista. 7 took me about 15 minutes.