I’m seeing a lot of ads now for people offering to clean out your PC, for a price. The sad truth is that most of the time people can do this for a lot less than what they offer for, many times it can be dome, by the computer’s user, for free. These companies mainly run scans and other cleaning programs on your computer to help speed it up.

First, people need to know why their computer slows down. It’s form all the “stuff” that’s done to our computer (files) while we do normal every day things. You go to a website and files are stored on your computer to help keep surfing the web optimal. Microsoft sends out updates that are stored as temporary files, programs such as MS Office, Adobe Acrobat, Flash player all store cache. All these files, if left unchecked, can take up a lot of space on your hard drive and can quickly add tens of thousands of files on your hard drive thus making it run slower (that much more stuff for the computer to sort though).

Just cleaning your cache though Internet explorer is not enough but there are some programs out there that help clean out your system well enough to make a difference. One of these programs is “Clean Cache 3″ by Butt Ugly Software. Unfortunately their site is not active anymore but it was freeware / donateware and I’ve set up a download on this site for the application (file size is roughly 1.25MB - pretty small for a handy application). Feel free to download and use it, I do not know if the links to donate are still valid.

Download the file and run the executable - most people are OK with the default options. When it is done, the window will appear and you will need to configure the program or else it won’t clean anything. The first tab you’ll want is the Internet explorer tab. You’ll need to check off most items (I choose to run it at Windows startup, but you can do it at shutdown if you want to).

I won’t get into the other browsers, but if you use them, don’t forget to check off all relevant items in each tab.

Next, is the Windows tab

As you can see, I have everything checked off in here, too. This will clean out a lot of the temp and cache files set up by Windows and MS Office. This will be your second best helper (next to the clean out). Again, I set mine to clean at Windows startup.

Next, are the additives:

This can also be a big help and if some relevant applications are not working, then this might help them run better, too (a bad download). It will clean out the cache from added programs, such as Java, Adobe Flash player, etc..

Lastly, the options window:

I just have it set up to run and clean at startup but you can select other options if you’d like. Now, the most important part - click on the “run complete cleanup” button - the first time you run it might take several minutes to run, don’t worry, it’s not frozen, it’s just deleting a lot of stuff. After this, unless you rarely reboot your computer, it should only take a few seconds to run. If you run your computer 24-7, then either set up a scheduled task to run it overnight or manually run it, maybe once a week.

Other programs that are a big help, and I always recommend:

• Safer Networking’s Spybot Search & Destroy (free download). This is a great utility to help clean out malware on your computer (mainly spyware). Just remember to keep it current!
• Another great utility is Lavasoft’s Ad-Aware (another free download). Yes, you need to include your email address but I’ve never gotten spam from them and they only use it to send you your “free” license and also to send you information on important updates (rarely). I use this in conjunction with SpyBot (never run both at the same time). Sometimes one will miss something that the other will pick up, thus catching close to 100% of all threats (no single program will get 100% but these two together work extremely well).
• For virus protection, I recommend AVG (click on the download under the “free download” (unless you want to purchase one of the higher end copies)). I’ve noticed that AVG is a great tool. Not only is it free, but I’ve noticed that it picks up a lot of issues that many of the paid for services do not, which today can be devastating to your security.

One other useful took is built into Windows - disc defragmenter (normally it’s Start - Programs - Accessories - System tools). It’s simple to run, too, just select the drive (mainly the C: drive) and click defragment. Just a note: this might take a very long time to run (sometimes days if your hard drive is really bad!).

Its scary at how a bunch of free tools can really help out your computer experience while improving on your own personal security.

I’m always on the lookout for good (and free) utilities, if you know of any for us to try out, feel free to post a comment with the program!