by Philrjones » August 30, 2009, 10:46 am
Hi,
Instead of a logger and assuming most TW haven't got much of a clue about PC's, try this.
Either:
Look at the internet history - select Favourites, then History.
or
Tools, Internet Options, and make sure the General tab is shown. (The next bit depends on the version of IE you have, but they're mostly the same).
Then select Settings under the View Browsing History - if you get a message "The amount of disk space....." etc, ignore it and hit cancel. Up comes a new box with Move Folder, View Objects and View Files. Select the View Files.
All the cookies, web pages, gifs etc will then be presented in a new window. You can trawl through that if you wish. It will tell you where the PC has visited since last it was "cleaned", i.e. something Windows Washer was run. If you don't know what that is, don't worry - worth looking on the web though - it get's rid of crap from the PC like all the files above and frees up space.
A quick way to clean things up is:
Open up Windows Explorer
On the left, click on My Computer
Right click on the C drive shown
From the menu shown, select Properties at the bottom
On the General Tab, select Disk Cleanup
The PC will take a few mins to have a look around then come back to you wth a list of where it can clean up. You can select/deselect what you want cleaning. The Compress Files can take a while, so you may want to uncheck that. Then click OK, and wait for it to finish.
If you haven't done defragging in a while, here's how to do it.
Open up Windows Explorer
On the left, click on My Computer
Right click on the C drive shown
From the menu shown, select Properties at the bottom
Go to the Tools tab
Under Degfragmentation select Degragment Now
A box pops up - select Analyze
PC will go and look if you need it or not and come back with a message whther you should do it or not.If not, just close out of everything. If yes, set the thing going - can take quite a while to do and I recommend doing the cleanup thing first as above.
If you don't know, think of defragging as this: - You have a filing cabinet for all your paperwork with multiple folders in there, one for bills, one for car, etc. Say you have a form for your car that has 2 parts to it and you take one part off and mistakenly file it in another folder. When you need the form, you need both parts so it's going to take you a while to find them again. Nearly the same thing with the PC - when you delete a file, add new stuff, it gets put all over the place and a single file can become fragmented - hence the term defragmented which is like putting them together again. Speeds things up for your PC. Don't do it all the time though - PC doen't like that, but perhaps once every month or 2.
Cheers
Phil