By Suzann Dodd, ContributorMAINTAINING YOUR computer is necessary if you want to prolong its life and insure the quickest implementation.
Yes, in ancient days, when one had a hard-drive of 800 megabytes
(800 million bytes) capacity, losing 50 megabytes was a serious divestiture. With hard-drives shrugging in at six gigabytes plus, one might consider worrying over a few million wasted bytes frivolous. It isn't.
Just as a few extra pounds might kill you, a few extraneous file scan cause serious impediments.
Too many secretaries never empty their trash, save everything to C:, and, don't be surprised how sluggish a computer can operate when it's full of garbage.
I'll give you an example.
My digital camera application has the sick habit of creating its own cache of garbage. As it must convert all photographs to TIF files to allow me to work on them, once creating this 'draft' it doesn't delete it.
I worked on 12 images and more than 40 million bytes was captured by crud files. If I hadn't deleted the crud, they would have been uploaded along with the images.
SENSITIVE OPERATING SYSTEM
Windows has always been a very sensitive operating system. It is easily confused. Unless one is active in deleting all trash and cache and preventing files which are not applications being saved to the root directory, all sorts of chaos can ensue.
Keeping your storage lean and mean makes the computer run more efficiently. Doing a disk clean-up and a defragging should be at least weekly exercises. If one has deleted a great number of crud files one should follow that with a defragging.
Old-time hackers, who used to download a lot of WAREZ (pirated software), knew how to delete, how to defrag so that no one could ever find a trace of the stuff on their computers.
(When you delete a file it's usually still there, only the first character is removed. This allowed Pirate Hunters to find so-called erased WAREZ. Hackers would download shareware of a similar size and delete them as well, following it up by defragging, another download and delete and another defragging which tended to obliterate the evidence).
For your own benefit, delete everything you don't need and remember that anything with a .tmp extension is invariably garbage.
Suzann Dodd is a writer and an attorney.
