third world county

For Windoze users who are just flat-out tired of all the hoops they have to jump through to clean all the junk Windoze and Windoze apps leave scattered around, you’d think the Cleanup manager, included in Windows since Win98 (I believe) would be pretty useful.

It isn’t. At least, not in its default config.

But for Win2K and above, there are some things you can do to make it useful, approaching the abilities of $40 standalone cleanup utilities. Easy things.

First, try this: START>RUN>cleanmgr /sageset:99

When you run Cleanup Manager with this switch, it’ll offer a bunch of useful additional options. Click whichever you want. Change your selections any time by simply running cleanmgr again with the same switch invoked.

Next, open a plain text editor (Notepad will do) and type in (or copy/paste from here):

cleanmgr /sagerun:99

Save the file as Cleanup.bat or some such name. The “bat” extension tells Windoze to run the plain text file as a batch file and makes it easy to invoke quickly w/o a chance for typing mistakes. Save the batch file in a folder you make just for such things. You can even place a shortcut to the thing on your desktop or in your start bar. Just click on it whenever you want it to run. Better yet, use Windoze built-in scheduler to run it periodically.

Now, this won’t clean up all the gunk left hanging around on your hard drive(s), but it’ll help a lot. More lil tips later, but this (and running a good registry cleaner every now and then) can help decruft your system pretty well.

After all, as long as you’re going to keep using Windows, you might as well make it run as well as reasonably possible, right?