Friday 1 August 2008

Why everyone should use disk cleanup on Vista everyday



IEStopWorking Wow, a couple of days ago I noticed why I was running low on hard drive space. Even though I have about 30 Gigs (it’s a miracle I have so much space left actually) for some reason my hard drive was extremely full. Turns out, every time a program crashes (like that nasty Internet Explorer crash in the picture to the left) on Windows Vista, the operating system stores 100 megabytes of system information on your hard drive, so that it can send to Microsoft to tell them why customers are unsatisfied with their product.

DiskCleanup

Oh so that’s why I only had 15 gigs left on my hard drive.

My computer on the other hand had 10 Gigabytes of error reporting information, that was queued to be sent to Microsoft. One can only imagine the amount of data Microsoft’s servers have to handle. But then again, if crashes on Vista weren’t so common, then this whole scenario would not have existed in the first placed. Nonetheless, I’ve learnt my lesson – use disk cleanup on Vista regularly! No exceptions. Or at least somehow get task scheduler to do it for me.





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2 comments:

  1. Indeed, it is important to run Disk clean up reguarly. What also is a good practice is to run windows Defragger tool. This will keep data files organized and will increase your general PC speed. If you have money to spend, it's worth purchasing a 3rd party defragger. You can read more about it here: Why you shouldn’t use Windows’ Defragger

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  2. Hello John,

    Yes, it is great if one has the time to run these tools, and even better if they have the time to afford third party tools that can do this for them. But I think windows should have evolved till the point where all this (especially disk cleanup concerning getting rid of unnecessary files) is performed automatically by the operating system (although windows Vista does defrag your computer AUTOMATICALLY now).

    Although, in my opinion, third party software shouldn't be used because they often mess too much with the operating system, and can sometimes even cause things to break down. Anti-virus software seems to be quite famous for doing things like this.

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