Today marks the end of my vacation, which brings a lone tear to my eye.
It was either too long or not long enough to make me excited to come back to work. I would ere on the side of insufficiency. At least that way I can justify doing this post at the office.
Not too long ago I did a
post on start up management, which mentioned the use of Glary Utilities and I promised that I would cover a wider array of its functionality at a later date. The future is here. Above all else, Glary is a one click maintenance tool, making it a very useful tool to run at the beginning of each day, or even after each reboot. Once downloaded from either their
website or
Ninite you are taken to the main tab labeled-you guessed it-"1-click maintenance".
The series of checkboxes mark what will be done once you enable the scan. Among the most useful are the Registry Cleaner, which fixes or deletes incorrect entries in the
registry, speeding up your computer, and the Temporary Files Cleaner, which deletes files that usually show up during an installation of a program and are meant to be deleted afterwards. These are very similar to the .DMG files that are used on a Macintosh. All they do once the program has been installed is take up space on your hard drive where you could be storing password protected archives of cats or synonyms thereof. The other features have their uses as well and there's no harm in running them but most of them should be looked at more carefully anyway. The Startup Manager checkbox does not clean up your startup as well as the actual manager, which was covered in the previous post. The spyware remover is typically useless as
Microsoft Security Essentials grabs most of that during its own scan, and most people prefer not to use the Tracks Eraser which deletes your internet history (useful in its own right but most people do that anyway) and all of your stored passwords.
Once you have completed the scan, if it's never been done before, you should notice a small increase in computer productivity. It's not unusual for a first time scan to pull up tens of thousands of registry errors, as they occur with vigorous frequency, not unlike spelling errors in my own posts. Fields of red squiggles haunt my nightmares. You may also notice another tab labeled "Modules". This is where the nitpicking can commence. There are 20 different modules designed to either repair issues with your computer or to simply maintain it. I've used a fair amount of the features at one time or another, including the Uninstall Manager, which allows you to batch uninstall programs. This can be a useful tool if you need to get rid of a fair amount of bloatware at a single time, but it's unpredictable and also allows you to delete vital programs on accident, so I typically avoid using the batch tool. What it does have is a disk defragmentation tool, a duplicate file finder, and a an empty folder finder, all of which clear up space on your hard drive.
In my experience, simple maintenance of a PC can extend the life of your computer by a couple of years, which is a considerable money saver if you're not like me and don't need high end components as soon as they're announced. There are ads for computer cleaning all over the place, all of which essentially do what Glary can do for you, and it's free. A poorly maintained computer is the natural enemy of productivity, much like I am the natural enemy of spelling and punctuation. Registry errors can run amok and wreak havoc upon your efficiency much like my comma usage can turn a simple expository piece into a work of dramatic pauses and run on sentences. So, if you're looking for a way to clean up your PC, look no further than Glary Utilities.
-Bluescreen
