Guide to Avoiding & Removing Windows Crapware
Windows has a lot going for it, but it’s also saddled with one of computing’s biggest annoyances: crapware. Here’s everything you need to know about identifying, avoiding, and removing unwanted software from your system. Read_More
Your computer gets goofed up when you click on emails whose origin you do not know or when you surf on the internet and click on odd pages whose content you are not sure of. Avoid that kind of behavior and run one of these three cleaner programs once a week and you won’t get your computer full of crud. Note: Use cleanup programs with caution and only use the basic default settings unless you are experienced.
1. Glary Utilities
Glarysoft’s Glary Utilities is one of the most consistently popular and most frequently recommended system utilities, and why not? It bundles some of the most useful Windows-related tools in one free download. It scans and cleans your PC, cleaning temporary files, removing junk files, fixing broken shortcuts, and resolving a wide range of issues, both major and minor, that most Windows users will have no trouble recognizing. You can configure its One-Click Maintenance option to run just those processes you want with a single click, making regular maintenance just too easy for excuses. You can run any of its many tools individually, too. CNET Download
2. Best Free Hard Drive Eraser:
Eraser allows you to easily add tasks to securely erase selected files and folders, unused disk space (aka free space), cluster tips (aka slack space), and the recycling bin. Eraser can overwrite the data area with your choice of a variety of random data patterns (14 default patterns and a custom pattern creator). It comes with a very detailed built-in help file. And the forum seems quite responsive to questions and problems. It works with any drive (including IDE, SCSI, and RAID), and with FAT16, FAT32, and NTFS partitions.
Complete description and download at https://eraser.heidi.ie/
3. Best Free PC Cleaner:
CCleaner, a product that started off as pretty basic but has continued to improve to the point where it is now very close to the best in its class regardless of price. It’s very effective in freeing up disk space by removing unused and temporary files, cookies, Recycle bin entries, Windows hot-fix files, history and cache files in many applications such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera, Safari and hundreds of others. Note you can configure preferences for browser cookies that you want to keep during a clean (in case you don’t want to delete them all), which is a convenient feature for many users. Complete description and download at https://www.lifewire.com/ccleaner-review-2625143
Wipe vs Shred vs Delete vs Erase: What’s the Difference?
You can delete a file without erasing it, erase a drive without wiping it, shred a file without deleting it, and wipe hundreds of files at once…that were already deleted. Confused? Read_More