Rob Young

Much to the annoyance of almost everyone who’s ever used Windows, it has a nasty habit of requiring a deal of maintenance to keep it running smoothly. While this may be great fun for tinkerers, it becomes a lot less fun once you’ve used operating systems that don’t require constant hand-holding! If you do nothing else, it’s advisable to defragment your hard disk and run disk cleanup on a semi-regular basis.

The first thing Disk Cleanup does when run is work out exactly how much space it can save you. Unfortunately, it has a nasty habit of turning into a tranquilised salesman while preparing its pitch on how much it can improve your life by compressing your older files (which I wouldn’t really advise doing)

To make this a little less like watching paint dry, you’ll need to edit a registry key (at your own risk)

1. Start > Run > regedit
2. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches\Compress Old Files
3. Double click the (Default) key to edit it
4. Erase the value
5. Click Ok and close the Registry Editor

Now next time you run Disk Cleanup, it should be a lot quicker.

As a bit of an aside, CCleaner is very good at purging the useless rubbish you accumulate on Windows. On a year old install once, I managed to rid myself of 10GB worth!