ccleaner Archives - The Silicon Underground

Cleaning the Windows registry – and optimizing

Dave Farquhar — Fri, 17 Feb 2017 12:00:53 +0000

Cleaning the Windows registry is a popular and controversial topic. Many pundits tell you never to do it. When I wrote a book about Windows back in 1999, I dedicated most of one chapter to the topic. But today the pundits

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Optimize Windows 10 for better performance

Dave Farquhar — Wed, 08 Feb 2017 12:00:37 +0000

When I first installed it, I thought it was pretty pointless to try to optimize Windows 10. Of course, I installed it from scratch on a computer with an SSD and 16 gigs of RAM. Then I upgraded a couple

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What I would do to fix Dr. A’s computer

Dave Farquhar — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 12:19:48 +0000

I left my conversation with Dr. A nearly convinced he doesn’t really need a new computer. The local store is pitching him a new $700 Dell Inspiron with a 1 TB hard drive and 6 GB of RAM and a

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Attempting to tame C:\Windows\Installer

Dave Farquhar — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 23:32:58 +0000

Nobody seems to know why the C:\Windows\Installer directory sometimes spirals out of control. All I can add is that I’ve seen this kind of behavior. At a previous job, I administered a couple hundred servers. I had web servers, database

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Ways to speed up an aging laptop

Dave Farquhar — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 13:57:38 +0000

Yesterday Lifehacker did a feature on laptop tweaks and upgrades, that basically came down to reinstalling the OS, adding memory, and upgrading to an SSD. All of those are good things to do of course, but there’s more you can

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Cleaning up what CCleaner can’t

Dave Farquhar — Mon, 27 Dec 2010 23:47:06 +0000

Longtime reader Jim ` offered to share his oh-so-sneaky method for killing temp files. I’m happy to share them today. Jim’s commentary is in plain Roman type. The file contents are in boldface. This trick works because the first file

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My first Windows 7 build

Dave Farquhar — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 00:34:28 +0000

I rebuilt a friend’s Windows 7 system this week. The system includes a 30 GB SSD to boot from, and a RAID 1 mirror of 1 TB drives for storage. Aside from the two 1 TB drives, it’s basically a

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Psst… Wanna compete with Best Buy?

Dave Farquhar — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 01:32:00 +0000

Best Bait-n-Switch is offering a service where they'll remove crapware from a PC for 30 bucks.

You can offer to do the same thing for 30 bucks, but do a better job. Here's how.

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Registry optimization

Dave Farquhar — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 21:08:33 +0000

I gave my Windows 2000 system a little tuneup today. Nothing major, but it feels peppier now, and didn't take all that long to do. Nor did it require any expensive utilities.

This works with Windows 2000, XP, NT4, and Vista. For Windows 9x advice, you'll have to turn to an old critically acclaimed book written by someone you've never heard of.

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Escape from Windows 98

Dave Farquhar — Sun, 25 May 2008 00:01:55 +0000

There've been a few times that I've met someone who was stuck in an old Windows 98 PC because it had all their software and data on it, it was set up the way they liked it, they may or may not have all the installation media, and it would take several days' worth of labor to set up a new one like the old one.

So usually in that situation I just bubblegum and duct tape the system together as best I can.

No longer. Not now that I've discovered PC Mover.

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