Why, DIsk Cleanup

Question

Assuming the that you have at least twenty percent free disk space, can anyone provide a factual basis for running 'disk cleanup', 'clean up 3.0' or any other simular utility.  Also consider I have a disk that is eighty-five percent full and I replace it with one fifty percent larger.  I load everything from the old disk to the new disk.  I keep the allocation units the same size.  The two disks are identical in all ways except for the size,  would you expect a speed improvement and why?  I ask these question because I see alot of advice which I don't understand the rationale for.

Midnight Star · Answer

msgale, :) Mike.

msgale · Answer

That tells me how we get the files, but not why having the files is a performance issue

Chik · Answer

msgale- The performance issue is not why I suggest cleanup, it's to remove the traces of the hijack. -chik

Chik · Answer

msgale- Installation programs and hijack programs leave a lot of junk here... Cookies, History, Recent Documents, Temporary Internet Files, Temp Files and the Recycle Bin. -chik

arnieday · Answer

All those junk files add to fragmentation of your hard-drive. Other than that, they are probably harmless.

Midnight Star · Answer

msgale,

Are you asking us if we know the specifics about the window's operating and file system that the question infers? or if we remove temporary files because some of them are 'baddies'? It seems that question would be better fielded in the software (optimizations) forums than "virus/ Spyware Informaton and Removal".

If a VPC, for example, stores files all over the place, then disk fragmentation would definitely cause a performance drop in disk throughput, and 'virtual performance' - how noticible would depend on the system, what was fragmented (ie paging file as opposed to an arbitraty seldom used data file) and the extent of the overall fragmentation.

Since all modern hard-drive controllers read entire 'tracks' so to speak, instead of individual sectors, disk fragmentation would cause more reads to take place, in order to get the entire file (if the sectors/blocks they're looking for, fall outside the track/cylinder read). If it's, let's say the paging file that fragmented, you'd see a noticible drop in performance. Now on older systems, where disk dma doesn't exist, and the drives don't have 'modern' disk-controller firmware built in, the performance decrease would be bad since more cpu time would be required to complete the read/write operation.

Now to what extent windows actually uses all the temporary data files it collects, i'm not certain, nor would that be relevant to 'cleaning' off a pc. But i'd be inclined to think that the more files and temporary stuff it had to keep track of, the less the os would reach optimum performance, especially if the NTSF had to keep track of 'recovery-transactions' for all that garbage.

-

Mike.

blondeguy · Answer

Mike, would you say that it is benefical to delete *.tmp files manually as well as use disk cleanup? Kirk

Midnight Star · Answer

Kirk, I've noticed that 'Disk Cleanup' doesn't alwasy 'get' everything it should; not sure why - maybe it's in a folder it doesn't look to or something (especially temp and IE stuff). If that happens, you'll need to manually delete the files that it misses if they're ringing up as a 'problem'. It won't delete all .tmp files on the harddriive, though, just the files in the folder(s) that it 'cleans up', since the cleanup program could technically only speak for 'itself' and the files that windows manages. I like doing it last during the malware 'cleanup' process, just in case malware has 'hijacked' or renamed a good program (or I make a mistake); if a file is deleted, and we need to recover it back, we can just restore it back from the recycle-bin. After we use disk cleanup (and select everything), the recycle bin is cleared out, so there's one less recovery option availble to me. - Mike.

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Why, DIsk Cleanup

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