McAfee QuickClean
Cleaning
Up Behind Windows Made Easier
I
have spent long, worrisome hours at home and work, attempting to clean
all the trash and junk out of my hard drive. This detritus includes files
left behind after an uninstall, Registry entries, and other loose ends
that always clutter a hard drive when you use Windows. The worst of this
garbage is that besides occupying precious drive real estate, some legacy
files can slow down the boot process and even make Windows less stable.
Other leave a trail of crumbs; showing where your surfing habits have
led for other to follow..
You could use an uninstaller program. Or you can try out the just launched McAfee QuickClean. It handles basic cleanups quite well with little effort. But use its more advanced features with extreme caution.
QuickClean uses Wizards to handle various tasks. There's QuickClean Lite that removes only items you're sure not to miss (such as what's in the Recycle Bin and temporary files). PowerClean lets you choose duplicate, orphaned or suspicious Registry entries that you can safely delete. Other Wizards help clean up noncritical files and unused shortcuts. There is an Internet-specific module to help delete the IE cache's content -- files and cookies. It can also tackle old e-mail messages and plug-ins.
All these Wizards allow you to select which items to delete. Also included are two uninstallers to remove entire programs. BackTrack gets rid of applications whose original installations were monitored. Remove tries to deduce which files and Registry entries associated with a specific program on your zap list being should be deleted. There are also tools to archive applications and moving them to other folders or PCs.
However, despite all its mod-cons, QuickClean doesn't really simplify drive-cleanup. Removing duplicate files remains inherently difficult because only you can decide which of two identical files needs to be removed. QuickClean hinders this by displaying duplicates in a fixed-size window that's not large enough to easily examine their details.
In the current build some features didn't work. The Cookies Wizard was supposed to list for deletion cookies that didn't have a matching IE bookmark. Instead the app listed for deletion all cookies. The Transport utility, used to move an application from one PC to another, missed a required .dll file when we tried to relocate Office.
Luckily, deleting the wrong files is not a reason for suicide. Everything you delete is saved in a compressed file for easy retrieval. You can also choose which files to delete and which to permanently remove.
A trial version for Windows 9x is available for download from McAfee's site - (http://download.mcafee.com/eval/platform-language2.asp?l=0&nz=0&prdc=35&s=HOME&o=10&zz=QuickClean&img=quickclean.gif). The site is terribly slow, so you will need to wait.
G
Menon
[email protected]