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[]ff ]DEEP CLEAN YOUR WINDOWS PCSWITCH TO PORTABLE APPS
Why let programs take more resources than they need? Instead of installing a program on your PC —
letting it scatter itself all over your hard drive and take up valuable space in the Registry — look to see
if a portable alternative is available. Portable apps are programs that restrict themselves to a single
folder — everything they need to run can be found inside that folder, so not only do you keep them in
check (delete the folder, remove the program — completely), you get to choose where they reside too.
Portable apps are a particularly good choice where you have Windows installed on a small system
drive. such as a 64GB or even a 32 GB SSD. You can store the apps on another drive, and leave
enough space for Windows to run smoothly. Not only that, if you have to reinstall Windows from
scratch, the portable app (and your settings) survive intact. You can even store portable apps on
a USB thumb drive, allowing you to port them — and your preferences — to another computer.
A great place to start for building your own portable app collection is http://www.portableapps.com.
Install the PortableApps Platform tool, which provides a custom Start menu for easy access to your
portable app collection, and makes it easy to install and update apps from its own extensive
collection. You can add other portable apps — including those portable tools we’ve covered in this
feature — manually by extracting them into folders inside the main PortableApps folder and choosing
‘Apps > Refresh App Icons’.version of PC Services Optimizer from Smart
PC Utilities (www.smartpcutilities.com/
servicesoptimizer.html).
Once installed, launch the app. After
visiting Services Manager — waiting while the
services list is populated and clicking Backup
— select ‘Automatic Tuneup’. You’ll now be
asked a series of questions, which are split into
four categories: Hardware, Security, Internet &
Network, and System Functions. Click OK
and any unnecessary services will be disabled,
providing your PC with a minor speed boost.
Gamers should also check out Gaming
Mode. This allows you to temporarily disable
services by switching Gaming Mode on to
maximise performance for gaming or a
similar processor-intensive tasks such as high
definition (HD) video editing. Click Preset
and experiment with Minimum, Normal or
Maximum settings, or manually tick which
settings to apply. Don’t be surprised if
Windows changes its appearance — when
you switch off gaming mode, things should
return to normal.
If things appear to go wrong after your
tweaks, simply click the Rescue Centre button
and select your backup to undo your changes.
VISUALISE DRIVE SPACE
Running out of drive space, but unsure what’s
gobbling it all up? CCleaner offers a Disk
Analyzer under Tools that can provide you with
a quick summary for individual or collected
drives, split into various categories (such as
pictures, documents or everything). When the
scan completes, a pie chart divides everything
up while the largest files are listed below,
complete with a tick box allowing you to select
specific files to delete via the right-click menu.
An alternative tool to try is freeware app
SpaceSniffer (www.uderzo.it/main_products/
space_sniffer). This portable tool (be sure to
right-click it and choose ‘Run as administrator’
to access all files on the selected drive)
provides a visual view based on folder rather
than type, giving you insights into where all
the space has gone rather than on which types
of content are gobbling it up. Click a folder to
peer inside it, or double-click to go inside and
drill down deeper until you discover what’s
taking up all your space.MORE CLEANING TIPS
Ty p e restore point into the search box and
click ‘Create a restore point’. Verify System
Restore is switched on — if not, select your
system drive and click ‘Configure’ to do so.
When you come to allocate space, consider
limiting it to 5GB or 5%, whichever is smallest.
This provides a good balance between giving
you usable restore points and not swallowing
up too much space on your system drive.
One obvious way to free up space without
deleting any files is to compress them. One
option would be to right-click the file (or folder)
and choose ‘Send to > Compressed (zip) folder’,
but while you can easily browse their contents
in File Explorer, third-party apps can’t access
the content unless you unzip it. Alternatively
use NTFS Compression instead, which
compresses a selected folder while retaining
its content. The resulting folder will be a littleslower to process, but is more convenient to use.
To do this, right-click the folder and choose
‘Properties’. Click ‘Advanced’ under General
and tick ‘Compress contents to save disk space’.
Remember, though, that this will only work on
NTFS-formatted hard drives.
One handy time-saving function are Jump
Lists, which appear when you click ‘>’ next to
an application in the Start menu or right-click
its taskbar entry. It pays to take the time to
manage these thoroughly — click the pin icon
next to an entry to pin it permanently to the
top of the list, or right-click a redundant entry
and choose ‘Remove from this list’ to get rid
of it. You can quickly clear all Jump List
entries using CCleaner (look in the Windows
Explorer section).
Finally, if you want to take full control of
the startup procedure, try Autoruns (bit.ly/
autoruns). Switch to its Logon tab and you’ll
find many more startup entries than those
provided by Task Manager or CCleaner.
Untick an entry to disable it, or right-click it
for more options, including deleting it and
checking it for possible malware.Stop programs from hogging
system resources by installing
portable versions instead.Tweak System Restore so that
it doesn’t take up too much
space on your PC’s hard drive.