Speeding Up Windows 'disk Cleanup'

[KevinW]

This information came in this morning via Brian Livingston, who has wwritten weekly Windows articles for Infoworld for many years.

 

IF you have ever run Disk Cleanup on a Win2K/XP machine, you know that there is often an extremely long delay while it tries to calculate how much space you could save if you were to compress your files. Well, Brian reports on how to bypass that whole process of calculating the possible disp space savings. The result is that you get an instaneous Disk Cleanup, just like we used to have on Win98 systems!

 

Here are the steps:

 

1. Click on Start > Run > Regedt32.exe

 

2. Backup your current registry.

To do this, click on File > Export and enter a name.

(I suggest using the date as part of your name, as in backup-reg-mar-3-2003)

 

3. After you have backed up your registry, drill down as follows:

HKey Local Machine > Software > Microsoft > Windows > Current Version > Explorer > Volume Caches > Compress Old Files

 

4. In the right hand pane, double click on the REG_SZ (default) variable to edit it

 

5. A window pops up that will have a long string of characters in the Value Data field:

B50F5260-0C21-11D2-AB56-00A0C9082678

 

6. Press DEL to remove (clear out) the value data field, then click OK and then exit the RegEdit program.

 

Note: we are NOT deleting the actual key, just the value assigned to the key!

 

7. That's it, and you don't even have to reboot!

 

-kw

[borfast]

WOW!

 

Now that's what I call fast!!

 

Thanks a lot kw!

Although I don't use Windows much, nowadays, I still have to clean it up from time to time and this is a real time saver

[SEO]

Good post KW.