Contents
This book shows you how to take the necessary steps to clean up your Windows installation and restore some of the speed that it had when things were brand new.

The book is divided into the following chapters: Why Is My Computer All Gunked Up?; Degunking Your PC; Getting Rid Of Files That Shouldn’t Be There; Uninstalling Programs You Don’t Need And Tweaking Those You Do; Organizing Your Desktop And Start Menu; Preventing Spam Gunk; Cleaning Up E-Mail Gunk; Cleaning And Tweaking Your Registry; Optimizing Your Hard Drive And Startup System; Installing Upgrades To Your System; The Best Hardware For PC Degunking; PowerToys And Awesome Shareware; Improving Security; Backing Up Precious Files; Last Resort Degunking Techniques

Review
Don’t you just love how your brand new PC screams when you first remove it from the box and boot it up for the first time? Miles and miles of open disk space, lots of free memory, that “new computer smell”… Then, over time, memory starts to disappear with resident tasks that didn’t used to be there. Boot-up now takes minutes instead of seconds. Programs that flew now amble along at pedestrian speeds. Congratulations! Your PC is “gunked up”. You need to degunk it with this book.

Degunking Windows is a twelve step program designed to help you organize your Windows installation such that you can find the things you need, you are only running the things that matter, and the underlying disk structure is properly formatted. While you can pick and choose what you want to implement, its best to follow the entire program to get the whole synergistic effect. For instance, I could start out by defragmenting my hard drive. Of course, if I still have a lot of garbage on my drive, the defrag won’t be as useful as it could be if I took the time to organize things first. The authors have written an extremely useful and easy to read “how to” manual that will add years to your PC’s life by getting it running closer to how it used to behave when it was new.

The book does assume a Windows XP environment for the degunking tasks. However, many of the steps (such as file cleanup, desktop cleanup, defraging, and such) are applicable to all version of Windows. So don’t panic if you’re not yet an XP user. Also, hardcore operating system gurus will either know all this stuff already or “scoff” at the simplistic approach. Fine, the book isn’t for you. But for those of us who more often are “users” of the operating system, the information is valuable and helpful. I’ve already regained nearly a gigabyte of disk space, and I’m still on step 1!

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