By Merrill Friend, Tampa PC Users Group
mfriendtampa@worldnet.att.net

Recently I began getting messages on my old Dell P166s that I was running out of disk space, so I deleted some programs I no longer needed and got rid of an accumulation of cookies that were of no continuing value and was surprised that very little disk space was actually released. I then deleted the internet cache files but still my hard drive was nearly full.

Using Windows Explorer I reviewed the programs listed there and found some files from programs I had removed using the Add/Remove programs feature of Windows 98se. Apparently these remaining files were not automatically removable. I wanted to remove them to free up hard disk space but I didn’t know how to do it safely. I had heard about Norton’s Clean Sweep software and decided to see what it could do for me. It turns out the program was selling for $29 at Comp USA with a $25 mail in rebate on items sold through the date of my purchase so I certainly wasn’t risking a lot of money by giving it a try. It was my lucky day.

The software box said the program would work with Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows NT and Windows 98 through Windows me. In my case it required 18MB of hard disk space and I had enough space available for my installation. (The amount of hard disk space and memory needed did vary based on which of the above operating systems was in use.)

The outside of the box touts the product with such phrases as “Frees valuable disk space”, “Removes unwanted programs safely and easily”, “Gives your computer a one-click cleanup”, and “Cleans out internet clutter”.

Installation was simple and required a restart of the computer to begin to function. Two new icons appeared on the desktop. One was for the Clean Sweep program and the other was for Fast and Safe Cleanup, as Norton calls it.

The Fast and Safe icon brings up a screen telling you how many bytes of space are available to be safely cleaned up instantly. If you choose to proceed, this feature eliminates all files in your web browsers Web Cache folder. It also cleans internet history files, empties all files in the Windows Recycle Bin, and deletes all temporary files from your Windows/Temp folder. Temporary files are files that other programs have created and not deleted. It also deletes all lost cluster files created by the Windows System utilities CheckDisk and ScanDisk.

These categories can be set by the user by checking the type of file to be cleaned so the user can decide to clean up only the internet history files or only the temporary files by simply selecting the category desired. Each category will reflect the amount of space that choice will free up so the user will know the amount to be freed before making a choice.

The program may also be set to delete all files in selected categories after Windows starts or may be scheduled to delete files in selected categories on a specific day and time.

The Clean Sweep part of the program was of the greatest interest to me. “Safety Sweep” appears to be the default option for Clean Sweep. Individual files are highlighted with a green or amber marker. When “Safety Sweep” is enabled only green highlighted items can be removed by and all selections are automatically backed up in a compressed format and can be restored if needed or desired. “Safety Sweep” can be disabled by the user allowing both green and yellow highlighted items to be selected and backups are optional but highly recommended.

In my situation I found that when I had removed a good-sized database program from the hard drive, a large number of DLL files remained which took up a huge amount of disk space. I had already uninstalled the program using Windows add/install feature but these DLL files remained. I decided to disable “Safety Sweep” and remove all these files, both those marked green and those marked yellow, and to back them up in the event I found it necessary to restore them.

I then read the report the software generated about what files it had deleted. As it turned out, there were still a very few files which were marked as “read-only” which were not removed but these utilized only a small amount of disk space and were not a big concern. I then tried other programs on my computer to see if any bells and whistles sounded because of the need for any of the deleted programs but fortunately nothing happened.

Erring on the side of caution I waited a few days trying other features of my machine and all worked well. Then I went back to Clean Sweep and totally deleted the files that were backed up since these backups were also taking up much of the needed disk space.

Even then the files were sent to the recycle bin and I had to delete them from there as well. I had now recovered over 165MB of space most of which had been used by the database DLL files and was I well pleased with the program.

The program may also be used to eliminate unwanted Active X controls downloaded from a web page to your computer hard disk and to remove unwanted plug-ins or unwanted cookies. There is also a “live update” procedure for upgrading the software similar to that provided on other Norton products.

I haven’t used the product long and haven’t yet used all its features but so far it has been a big help in what I wanted to do and I would recommend it to anyone with similar problems. u