It never fails, whenever you are considered the "guru" by your family and friends, you always get ... "hey, while you are here could I get you to look at......"
I am trying to build a toolkit of portable apps to do the standard system cleanup on windows. I have been just carrying all of the installs on my key but thought that it would be cool to just have them portable if it is possible. I am open for suggestions for any and all utilities that can be used this way. Normally thy have some sort of spy-ware that is causing system slowdown but sometimes it is configuration blah blah you all know the drill.
I have ClamWin for virus scanning
dd-0.3 for windows for drive imaging
Restoration for file recovery
SIW for system info
a lot of the password utilities from nirsoft
UnknownDevices so I can look for missing drivers (just in case)
I Need
Junk file cleaner
Registry cleaner
Spy-ware cleaner
I am thinking that after I get a good system cleaning toolkit put together I will make an AutoIt script to run them all and compile it to an exe so that it can be run from PStart and will not require AutoIt. So, what kind of input does everyone have?
System and Cleaning tools
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Toxteth O'Grady
- Posts: 184
- Joined: Wed Feb 15, 2006 12:06 am
To do delete system/app temp files and other junk I use the excellent DiskCleaner. It has many plugins for popular applications, so it can delete some unecessary files that haven't been generated by Windows itself, as well as the usual Windows Internet Explorer junk and temp folder stuff.
To clean the registry I use RegSeeker. It seems a little bit aggressive (i.e. it doesn't really give a clear indication of what is safe to delete or not) but I don't think it's ever caused my PC to crash. It does backup all deleted entries should you remove anything disastrous. I think it can also clean-up other registry based entries like the programs in the add/remove control panel.
I also use OrphansRemover to get rid of dead shortcuts on my desktop/start menu etc.
I'm lead to believe that EasyCleaner can do all of the above in one program and more besides but I've never tried it (plus it's suppose to be portable).
I'm also under the impression that Ad-Aware can be portable since you can get a plugin for BartPE (the WinXP liveCD). However, I'm not 100% clear that this implies portability so someone please feel free to correct me on this. I usually install Ad-Aware on whatever computers I use, pretty much as one of the first applications to go on there after AVG anti-virus.
To clean the registry I use RegSeeker. It seems a little bit aggressive (i.e. it doesn't really give a clear indication of what is safe to delete or not) but I don't think it's ever caused my PC to crash. It does backup all deleted entries should you remove anything disastrous. I think it can also clean-up other registry based entries like the programs in the add/remove control panel.
I also use OrphansRemover to get rid of dead shortcuts on my desktop/start menu etc.
I'm lead to believe that EasyCleaner can do all of the above in one program and more besides but I've never tried it (plus it's suppose to be portable).
I'm also under the impression that Ad-Aware can be portable since you can get a plugin for BartPE (the WinXP liveCD). However, I'm not 100% clear that this implies portability so someone please feel free to correct me on this. I usually install Ad-Aware on whatever computers I use, pretty much as one of the first applications to go on there after AVG anti-virus.
I use easycleaner and it seems that it is portable to me. not certain. I notice that the ini has some refs to your local drive after the install and using it but you can erase the option file and all it will do is ask for your language and setup a new one. Just like a fresh install. I have not checked the registy to see if it writes anything there though.