That's your choice for sure, and if you stay on top of, that's great. But the vast majority of users have no desire to babysit their computers. And frankly, they should not have to. And the good news is, with a modern version of Windows like W8.x, they don't have to because W8.x is eons ahead of XP and is fully capable of doing it right with no problems. MS has had 20+ years to sort it out, after all. We have to give their armies of PhDs, CompSci engineers, super computers and decades worth of statistical data some credit. It is highly unlikely any of us are smarter than them.
CountMike said:
No CCleaners, no optimizers and stuff like that, haven't seen need for them for long time now.
Sorry for laughing, but what do you think Disk Speedup is but an optimizer? And note that Revo Uninstaller is nothing more than a disk cleanup and registry cleaner too! I am not saying there is anything wrong with them, but don't think for a second they are not cleaners or optimizers. They are
exactly "stuff like that"!
And for the record, I find it a bit counterproductive to use a 3rd party defragger. Why? Because the second, and I mean that quite literally, the second you start to use your computer after defragging, the fragmentation process starts all over again. So the few percentage point advantage in efficiency a 3rd party defragger offers is quickly negated and the playing field leveled as files are opened, temp files saved, Windows files are updated, replaced, and new files created.
Plus, Windows defragger is already in there. It makes no sense to me to download and install yet another program that takes up more disk space if we are concerned already about conserving disk space.
Best option for keeping system clean is not to let it get dirty
Agreed. And for that, I am a huge fan of CCleaner. That said, I really like Windows own Disk Cleanup program to keep my system tidy too. But with CCleaner, I can tell it which cookies I want to keep so I don't have to re-enter my log-in credentials for the sites I regularly visit every time I cleanout the clutter on my drives.
crawfish said:
I disabled the Windows 8 defragger for my hard drives due to its terrible behavior WRT consolidating free space
No doubt Windows Disk Optimize (its defragger) is a "basic" defragging tool. But I contend a basic tool is all we need, in part for what I said above, but also with today's HUGE drives, consolidating free space is not that important. That only matters if you are running low on free space and with today's inexpensive monster-size disks you should not be running low on free disk space. The fact is, if you consolidate your free space (which, in effects, jams all the files together) you contribute to fragmentation because Windows Update and other program updates change files sizes all the time which then forces the new file to be saved out in the free areas, leaving holes where fragments will be saved. Not a problem if you regularly manually defrag but that just increases wear on your drives. And IMO, having to manually defrag drives these days is an unnecessary inconvenience - and waste of my time.
As I said above, it does not matter if your files are scattered, as long as the file segments are saved together. And ensuring you have lots of free disk space does that.