Introducing Windows 7  Maintenance tools

This is part of a series of articles about maintaining your computer using Windows 7 Maintenance Tools. Just as you have to maintain your car on a regular basis, it also important to perform regular maintenance checks on your computer. Windows 7 provides several tools to help you do this. Three are located in the System Tools sub-folder in the Accessories menu. The other is found in the Control Panel.

The Old System Tools

In the previous versions of Windows, namely Windows XP and Windows Vista, four basic maintenance tools were available. They were Disk Cleanup, Disk Restore, and Disk Defragmenter. Another essential tool was the Add and Remove Programs. This feature is found within the Control Panel.

Windows 7 continues to use these tried and trusted system tools.

We’ll look at each one in a series of articles commencing with Disk Cleanup. This tool is dealt with in the remainder of this article. The others tools covered are as follows:

• Essential Windows Maintenance – Part 2              Disk Defragmenter
• Essential Windows Maintenance – Part 3              Uninstall or Change a Program and System Restore

Maintenance Tool No 1 – Disk Cleaner

Its basic purpose is to free up space on your hard disk. You can never have too much space available. In its regular form it finds and removes temporary files, empties the Recycle Bin, and a range of files on your computer hard drive that are no longer needed.

You can open the Disk Cleanup in a number of different ways. The most common methods are described below.

• Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Disk Cleanup
• Start > Search > Type: disk cleanup > Click Disk Cleanup

Opening Disk Cleanup

We’ll use the first method.

1. Click the Start button.
2. Select All Programs.
3. In the All Programs menu, select Accessories.
4. Inside System Tools, select Disk Cleanup.
5. In the Disk Cleanup dialog box, select the drive.
6. Click the Ok button to commence cleanup.Note: If you have more than one drive or partition on your computer you need to select which drive  to clean. Click the arrow button and choose the drive.
7. Disk Cleanup’s begins checking the selected drive.
8. After this check the main Disk Clean up window.

Having opened Disk Cleanup it’s time to put it to work. Already Disk Cleanup has flagged files you can safely delete. These are in the checked boxes in the section, Files to delete.

The illustration shows you some of the checked boxes.

1. Scroll down the list to see what other groups of files are selected.
2. Generally, it’s a good idea to accept Disk Cleanup’s recommendations.
3. Click the Ok button.
4. Windows removes these unnecessary files.

Warning!

Windows generally errs on the side of caution, leaving some file groups unchecked. As you scroll down the list you may decide to check other boxes. Just be cautious when making additional selections!

When you open Disk Cleanup in the lower section of this window is a button labelled, Clean up system files. This starts the cleanup process over again opening up additional options.

Let’s look at what happens if we click the Clean up system files button.

1. Click Clean up system files.
2. Disk Cleanup re-commences checking the drive.
3. Then a new tabbed version of Disk Cleanup opens. This new window has two tabs, Disk Cleanup and More Options.

The illustration below shows you the sequence of events.

Now with More Options window open, let’s look at what you can do here!

Working with More Options

When you select the More Options tab, two other maintenance applications become available.

They are:

• Programs and Features
• System Restore and Shadow Copies

1. Clicking the Clean up button in Programs and Features section, opens Uninstall and Change a program, normally accessed through the Control Panel.
2. Clicking the Clean up button in System Restore and Shadow Copies section, opens System Restore normally found in the System Tools a sub-folder in the Accessories menu..

The next two illustrations show the effect of clicking the Clean up buttons in the More Options window.

Picture 1 Accessing unistall or change a program

Picture 2 – Accessing System Restore

Clean up done.

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