Austin's Thoughts

In the past years, I have had sev­eral of my fam­ily and friends ask me to look at their com­puter because all of the sud­den their com­puter stopped work­ing or it runs slowly when they try to browse the inter­net. When I asked them when was the last time they cleaned their com­puter, the com­mon response is “Am I sup­posed to do that?”

Your com­puter is like your car. Every three months or 3,000 miles, your car needs an oil change to keep the car run­ning. Your com­puter needs the same main­te­nance plan to keep it run­ning and extend the life of your pc. The best way to give your a PC an oil change is to install CCleaner.  CCleaner is a sys­tem opti­miza­tion and pri­vacy tool. It removes unused files from your sys­tem — allow­ing Win­dows to run faster and free­ing up valu­able hard disk space. It also cleans traces of your online activ­i­ties such as your Inter­net his­tory. But the best part is that it’s fast (nor­mally tak­ing less than a sec­ond to run) and it is free  You can get your copy of it by click­ing on this link:

“http://filehippo.com/download_ccleaner/”

After down­load­ing the file, run the exe­cutable file on your com­puter.  You can run the default set­tings except for uncheck­ing “Add Yahoo! Tool­bar”.  After it suc­cess­fully installs, it auto­mat­i­cally pops up and ready for use.  Let’s clean our machine.

Step 1: Click on “CCleaner” but­ton on the left hand side. Check all boxes except for “Auto­com­plete Form His­tory” and “DNS Cache” and then click “Run Cleaner”. After it get’s done clean­ing, it will show how much space is freed up. In this exam­ple I just cleaned up my com­puter and it freed up 369.3 MB of space.

Step 2: Click on the “Reg­istry” but­ton on the left hand side and click on “Scan for Issues”. It will look for unused file exten­sions, appli­ca­tion issues, or any either issue that could be slow­ing down your com­puter. After it has dis­cov­ered all the issues, all you have to do is click “Fix selected issues…”. It will prompt you to save a backup reg­istry. Click yes and save it in “Your Doc­u­ments”. Finally click on “Fix All Selected Issues” and we are all done.

Do these steps above every three months and you will see the difference!

If you need any assis­tance with CCleaner, please feel free to con­tact me at www.austinitconsulting.com