Microsoft finally has its own version of CCleaner

[Andrew]

About time. My 4Gigabyte Win10/32 pro machine is getting a bit slow.

Who is going to be brave and try it (when available) ?.

Andrew

[Owain Lastname]

It's available now.

So far nothing's stopped working.

Owain

[Andrew]

Nothing comes up with this search though.

CCleaner appears, but not the new-fangled PC manager from m$soft

[wasbit]

Why would I need to when CCleaner works fine on Windows 8.1, 10 & 11. IMO it is trying to do too much.

[Brian Gaff]

The point is ccleaner works on older machines too, and as for speeding up. Would I be right in thinking your slowing machine has a normal hard drive? The way to speed it all up is to fit an ssd and clone the system onto it My flabber was ghasted when I saw the difference it made even though the old system was defragged. Brian

[Brian Gaff]

Yes, and 8 gigs will also speed up a slowing windows 7 machine, probably 10 as well, so worth the investment if the machine is otherwise good. Buy it for Christmas an ssd and another four gigs of ram and it will be liike a new machine in most cases. Brian

[Owain Lastname]

The link was on the webpage op cit.

Owain

[Paul]

The "cleanmgr.exe" exists on the OSes right now, and was back-ported to Windows 7 as well.

One of the features it has, is the ability to properly remove C:\Windows.old after an Upgrade install. This can be important if you're about to install yet another Upgrade version on top. C:\Windows.old will also auto-delete itself, but if you need

20GB of space back this minute, Cleanmgr.exe will do it for you.

The negative of Cleanmgr.exe, was that it proposes to erase the Downloads folder. There used to be a tick box for that, and you had to check it was unticked before running a set of tick boxes.

When Cleanmgr.exe offers to clean up Window Update, this can involve a long session of re-compression of materials on disk, which for most people, is entirely unnecessary. Some tablet owners with 32GB eMMC storage, may see some value in this, but since the software doesn't document what it is about to do, the utility lacks the "precision of intent" that should be provided with such utilities. Any tool with "auto-delete" capability, where carelessness could lead to tears, should be extra-careful with its balloon help. If a person was not planning to sit on their hands for three hours, a compression run might be an unexpected side effect.

*******

On the topic of Win10 and Win11, as Administrator:

compact.exe /compactos:query # Check whether the 32GB eMMC tablet is # compressing WinSXS

compact.exe /compactos:never # On a desktop, change the policy, plus # decompress the materials right now. A spinning # cursor animation, tracks as files are decompressed # without naming them. A decompressed file system # is more compatible with Linux, when you're trying # to traverse NTFS, or delete NTFS materials. The # files open a microsecond faster, if not compressed.

fsutil behavior set disablecompression 1 # disable new compression format entirely # Only do this after decompressing the # damage already done

gpedit.msc # For a W10/W11 Pro user, alternative to fsutil.

computer configuration\Administrative template\system\filesystem\ntfs\Do not allow compression

*******

Defragmentation is an entirely different issue, and the Optimize panel shows whether partitions have been automatically defragmented within the last seven days or not. The Windows defragmenter for hard drives, does not defragment files larger than 50MB, thus avoiding spending too much time on your movies, where the movies don't really need to be defragmented. Other third-party utilities can be run, if you want the remainder of defrag (stuff >50MB) to be processed. Small files are profitably defragmented, so they load faster (.exe, .dll).

SSD drives offer TRIM as an alternative maintenance command rather than defragment. But, if the SSD was involved in a lot of stacked shadow copies (VSS), the OS may decide the SSD really does need to be defragmented, in order to return normal speeds. So while we can say "you don't need to defragment an SSD", and that's mostly true, there are pathological cases where intervention is needed. Excessive use of VSS shadow copies, may happen with certain backup and restore products. If you're curious about shadows, you can check. As admin:

vssadmin list shadows

Paul

[Andrew]

But 8 Gigs won't speed up a 32 bit version of Win 7 or 10 :-)

- which is what I have for historical reasons.

Andrew

[Tim Lamb]

In message <tj3bpj$1l7q$ [e-mail]>, Andrew [e-mail] writes

Me too. I read Paul's piece with less than a glimmer of understanding (this Latin is Greek to me!)

I dare say something might be able to speed up a 10 year old system But I am not brave enough to try. I already have 8 gigs.

[Paul]

Well, I ran 8GB on WinXP 32-bit, and the trick to that is, PAE would have allowed WinXP to run 64GB of RAM, but the Microsoft "memory license" prevents it. PAE is enabled by default on Windows XP, at least at SP3 Service Pack.

As it turns out, the memory license is applied to Ring3, which is the ring your applications run in. The kernel and drivers run in Ring0, and there's no memory license down there.

One RAMDisk product, runs at driver level (as you would expect), and it exploited this hole, so the 4GB of RAM WinXP "could not access", could be used as a RAMDisk. The RAMDisk has an option to "use PAE memory", something the competing RAMDisk products would not bother with.

I used that RAMDisk all the time, fur unpacking things. Until my WinXP machine died.

Now, the interesting part is, you can put pagefile.sys on the RAMDisk. This allows 5GB of 32-bit programs to be loaded on WinXP, and the page-in and page-out of those is buttery smooth.

For those who don't believe me, here is another example of thwarting the memory license. In this example, Geoff finds a way of defeating the limit on Vista. But of course he can't post the details, as he could be charged under DMCA if he did.

Paul

[The Natural Philosopher]

Once you have enough RAM as your OS can use, then all that is left is really the hard disk, and here a SSD really makes a difference. Other than that, you need a more modern chipset on the motherboard. And a 64 bit OS.

I even have a perfectly good 64 bit motherboard equipped macvhine that I replaced with second hand HP desktop that is lying idle, because frankly I dont need another desktop class machine and its power consumption/performance profile is way less than the HP.

[Paul]

There are a few articles out there now about it.

The pictures show some of the things it proposes to do.

For browser caches, it proposes to clean MSedge cache and the (defunct) Internet Explorer cache. MSEdge has the ability to kinda "fake" Internet Explorer operation, but the part it cannot handle is ActiveX add-ons or installs, MSEdge can't do those. Maybe the reason it does not list a Firefox cache, is they didn't install Firefox to test or something.

And the idea of cleaning memory, there is a small amount of logic to that. If the OS is under memory pressure, applications can be requested to release any memory they aren't using, and this can make a temporary change to available memory. But as time passes, the applications are likely to return to their slightly bloated state, like before. I would expect a feature like this, to just be a novelty item.

Modern Windows, doesn't have the same paging behavior (pagefile.sys) that it used to have. And presumably part of the reason, is to avoid wearing out an SSD or NVMe storage device by doing so.

Paul

[Jonathan]

Inded Jonathan