Clean junk and erase usage tracks!

Windows and most of the software create temporary files. These files are no longer needed when the corresponding application is closed. But these files are not removed in all the cases and continue to accumulate. In most of the cases, “Temp” folder inside the “Windows” folder is used by the applications to store the temporary files.
While surfing Internet, browser like Internet Explorer stores the downloaded web pages, images and other files in the “Temporary Internet Files” folder inside “Windows” folder. Other browsers like Opera, FireFox and NetScape store these files in their own cache folders.

It’s better to clean these files regularly to maintain the computer “squeaky” clean. Another reason to clean these files is that, it has become a favorite hideout for malicious programs like viruses, spyware and/or adware.

It’s cumbersome to manually search for these files and delete manually. But, to ease up the job there are numerous software to do the job. One of them worth mentioning is CCleaner. It searches and deletes not only temporary files created by Windows and other applications but also the cache of browsers. It deletes files with extensions like .tmp, .bak, .chk among others. It also deletes the cookies set by web sites when you visit them. As they say “best things in life are free”, CCleaner is a freeware.

Now let’s come to the task of removing of “usage tracks”. Usage Tracks are registry entries created by software to “remember” the recent operation made by user. For example, when you open Windows Media Player, in the File Menu, you can see the files that are opened recently. This is also called as “MRU” standing for “Most Recently Used”. To remove these entries, there is one small freeware tool called MRUBlaster. This tool scans for the MRUs of the applications supported by it, and deletes them. MRUBlaster supports cleaning of more than 30,000 MRU items covering different applications and Windows itself. There’s also an option to run MRUBlaster automatically at startup, so that it clears MRUs at every startup.

These are the tools which should not be missed by any computer user! It’s a good practice to run these tools before shutting down the computer or after disconnecting from Internet.