How to clean and boost your PC ?
« My PC crashes ! »,« My PC is slow at startup ! »,« How to clean my computer ? »,« How to boost my PC effectively ? » … These questions come up very often on the Internet.
This is a complete tutorial on how to effectively clean your PC and boost it’s performance.
Summary
Clean your Windows PC
Uninstall harmful and unnecessary programs
The first step is to remove software that is harmful to the security and stability of Windows.
How to do ? Nothing could be simpler: we will use either the Programs and Features tool built into Windows or CCleaner. Using one or the other is a matter of taste, they both do the same thing.
Where to find them?
- Go to Control Panel > Uninstall a program.
- If you are using CCleaner: Tools > Uninstall.
In order to not miss any malicious software, you will read each line carefully: it corresponds to a program installed on your system.
As soon as you spot suspicious software, if in doubt, remove it. You will always have the means to reinstall this software if it was actually useful to you. To find out, do not hesitate to do a search on Google with the name of the software, you will obtain valuable information on its usefulness and its function.
when removing software, you may get the error message: “Error: 2 – The specified file could not be found“. This means that the uninstaller software cannot be found. There is no need to keep this software in the list of installed programs, so you can select it and click on the Delete button (with CCleaner).
Viruses, malware and other spyware are very smart, in most cases they are difficult to locate. This is why we are going to use software to remove these spyware: ADWCleaner.
Remove malware
ADWCleaner is a very effective software to remove spyware that has installed itself without your knowledge in your PC.
- Download ADWCleaner and run it.
- Click the Scan button to start scanning for malware on your computer.
- When the scan is complete, ADWCleaner shows you all the viruses/spyware it has found. It classifies them by theme: services, folders, files, shortcuts, tasks, registry and browsers (Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome). Be curious and look at what the malware has spotted. Anything that is checked will be removed by ADWCleaner. By default, it selects all the elements it has found. If you think the software is wrong, uncheck the box corresponding to the suspicious file (be careful, be sure of what you do!).
- ADWCleaner is very effective at finding malware that has become embedded everywhere in Windows. If you follow the tutorial from the start, you will notice that even if we uninstalled all the malware with CCleaner, malware is still present. This is why you always have to go further than simply uninstalling software when you really want to clean your PC.
After checking, click on the Clean button to start cleaning the PC. At the end you will be requested to restart your PC. - Finally, after restarting, a report opens with the list of items that the software has deleted from your hard drive.
Disable software that launches when Windows starts
Now let’s remove unnecessary software that launches when Windows starts.
In addition to slowing start-up, these programs slow down the whole system by their simple presence. Indeed, once launched, they consume a big part of the resources of our computer. We will therefore remove these software to boost our PC.
As with uninstalling software, you have two options: either use the tool included in Windows or use CCleaner.
For the first, if you are using a version lower than Windows 8, you can access it by doing: Start menu> Run> msconfig> Startup. On Windows 8 and 10, launch Task Manager (right click on the taskbar) then go to the Startup tab.
Otherwise you have CCleaner, more complete. This is the one I will use for the rest of the tutorial. To access startup management with CCleaner go throw Tools> Startup.
Now you have to spot and disable unnecessary software. One line corresponds to software that launches on startup. We will therefore take note of each line and as soon as we locate a program that seems useless to us, we select it and then click on the Disable button.
You can also delete a program from the start list with the Delete button. Preferably, don’t use this option, use the Disable button instead. Only when you are sure that a program is malware or virus can you erase it.
After cleaning the Windows startup list, restart your PC.
