INLSA
From the very first moment you start using a computer, it accumulates data. Over time, your computer collects remnants of websites you’ve visited, saves passwords and e-mail addresses, stores leftover installation files for updates you download and install, and hoards a lot of other bits and pieces we in the industry call “temporary files”. Left unchecked, these scraps of your digital life build up in a variety of obscure and hidden locations on your hard drive, wasting disk space and slowing down your computer. If you ever get rid of your PC, they may also represent a risk to your privacy – as I explained in last week’s column. So make a New Year’s resolution to clear out the junk, speeding up your PC and protecting your privacy.
Utilities: Excellent utilities have been developed to effectively remove these traces and “sanitise” a computer. The improvement in performance after a good clean-up can be dramatic. One of the most popular of these is CCleaner, a free download from www.piriform.com/ccleaner . I’ve referred to this helpful software a few times over the years as it’s got just about all you could want to restore the pep to a Windows system that’s battled years of use. More importantly for those who are passing on or disposing of a computer, CCleaner has a tool that can securely “wipe” the free space on a hard drive. This prevents recovery of any data you have deleted, while conveniently leaving your programs and Windows software intact.
When files are deleted in Windows, they are not completely destroyed. Instead, the space that a file occupies on a hard drive is simply marked as available for re-use. It’s up to your computer to decide when, if ever, it will subsequently overwrite that space with a new file. If there is plenty of other free space, your hard drive may not return to that location for years. If someone were to run file recovery software, the deleted file, or at least a portion of it, could possibly be restored. CCleaner’s “free space wipe” function has an innovative approach to this problem. It creates a file so big that it (temporarily) occupies all the free space left on your hard drive. This action forces your hard drive to return to whatever available blocks it has lying around and fill them with new file data. Once the huge file is created, CCleaner completely overwrites it with useless random data, which is then deleted, leaving you with “clean” free space. Recovering any data previously deleted from this free space is almost impossible – most recovery tools would recover nothing but garbage. CCleaner is especially useful as a system cleaner because it is aware of a number of places where data secretly lurks.
Its developers have included support for a variety of popular applications such as Microsoft Office, Adobe Reader and of course, all the popular web browsers. CCleaner automatically detects these applications and depending on your choices, either securely erases or simply deletes any unwanted traces of user activity without removing the applications themselves.
By default, CCleaner merely deletes the traces as this is faster. To securely erase them instead, click Options Settings and select “Secure File Deletion”. This process is slower but ensures that traces of your activities are securely removed forever.
To get started with CCleaner, download the free version from www.piriform.com/ccleaner . Before you get cleaning, see www.piriform.com/ccleaner/tour for a brief illustrated tour of the program’s main features.
One last thing to note: when you install CCleaner, it may prompt you to automatically install Google Chrome too – this is Google’s popular web browser, which is bundled with the CCleaner installer, but not required for its operation. You can un-tick this option if you don’t wish to install Chrome, or you can uninstall Chrome later if you’re not using it.
See you next week!
