How can I clean my hard drive without reformatting and erasing everything?

Question

I recently purchased a used computer. The person who gave it to me did not clean his hard drive very well. It has some things on it that I do not want and yet some other items that would be of use. (not personal info). Is there any free tools that will clean the harddrive and romove certain items yet keep others?

Answer 1

CCleaner is one of the best FREE programs out there. It's FREE forever as well. No nags or popups.

What you nay want to also do is click on My Computer Icon and when the window opens look for Program Files. Click on that to open it up. Look over all the programs that are installed on your computer. What you don't need or want, deleate that file.

CCleaner will also remove left over files, short cuts as well as everthing that was left behing from a un-install. Lots of programs that are un-installed really are not totally un-installed. This is simply a built in thing for that software. These end up slowing the computer down and takeing up space you could be useing for something else.

Hope this helps and have a great Holliday. Good luck with your new computer.

Answer 2

i presently put in sixty 4-bit residing house windows 7 on a working laptop or computing gadget that had 32-bit Vista. i'm not sure if I put in it as I could desire to have yet each and everything seems to be working high quality. I booted off the residing house windows 7 sixty 4-bit CD and replaced into awaiting to be asked if i had to do a custom installation and reformat my force. It did no longer question me the two. in certainty, it did no longer question me a element. It additionally looked as though it may stall out a pair of situations without information as to what it replaced into doing or if it replaced into nonetheless working. i replaced into in touch that it wasn't working ideal or that I hadn't performed something I could desire to have. even with the undeniable fact that, i desperate to attend it out and it finally executed effectively and it did no longer reformat my force. easily, this replaced into a standard installation that went lots quicker than I bear in suggestions Vista taking.

Answer 3

Move everything you want to keep to a folder on your hard drive. Then use a bootdisk [DOS, Linux, anything, even XP Recovery Console] and delete everything else. Then reinstall XP [if desired], or whatever OS, and make sure to tell it NOT to format the hard drive. Then, you can take your stuff out of the folder and use it again. Or burn everything off to a DVD and completely erase everything.

Answer 4

delete the programs you don't want. download and use adaware to take care of spyware. go to www.commandondemand.com can use their free virus scanner. defragment the hard drive. if the computer is running slow, you might even want to shell out the cash and but a registry cleaner, like registry mechanic to clean up the registry

Answer 5

Well if U are not sure what files to delete and U want a clean personal hard drive.My advice is you format your hard drive and reinstall a clean windows to your hard drive

Answer 6

no program can distinguish between what is good crap and bad crap..
you will have to sift through it all :o
or do to download.com and search for harddrive cleaners..

customise explorer.. open my docs and go to tools, folder options, check "Use checkboxes to select items" then hit OK.. click Folders and check all the folder you want rid of. Press the delete key

Adam

Answer 7

Just take backup of the required items on the removable drives and then format ur harddisk.Hope this would solve ur problem.

Answer 8

Ok delete the items which you don't want,then defragment your drive, install good registry cleaner which you can find easily at www.download.com

Answer 9

That's usually just a search and destroy mission.