General Windows Vista check-up

Question

Being very new to windows can anyone recommend a tool/app that does a general clean-up health-check for a windows vista system. Coming from a mac world I would use onyx or main menu and fsck - etc

Answer 1

We generally don't recommend these programs for Windows, as they can do more harm than good most of the time.

Vista does pretty well at maintenance, disk defrag runs on a schedule automatically, you can use Disk Cleanup once a month if you wish.

http://www.microsoft.com/atwork/maintenance/speed.aspx

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Once a month run chkdsk command (no switches) it will check the integrity of the file system in read only mode, if it finds problems, re run chkdsk with the f switch (chkdsk /f)

See method 2

http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/67612-check-disk-chkdsk.html

Others here may recommend CCleaner, be careful if you use it, It has a registry cleaner that can do more harm than good also.

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