Many of us Windows users have experienced the frustrating mysteries – we find our hard-disks shrinking and shrinking after some period of usage. Emptying the recycle bin didn’t solve the mystery, neither did clearing the TEMP folder.
Here I’ll present two amazing, freeware products from Piriform
This program is an excellent clean up utility. As far as I have tested it myself, this is unlike many other products which try to delete as many files as they could to make them sound useful. CCleaner performs safe operations and I haven’t broken my computer with it. On my first time use, it discovered and recovered more than 1GB of my hard disk space!
Another freeware product from the same company. Defraggler is originally intented to use as a defragmentation tool, but it surprisingly served extremely well at discovering large chunk of mysterious files that choke up precious disk space. One unique feature this piece of software has is the ability to defrag individual files. And the Analyzer is blazing fast too – it analyzed my 80GB drive in less than 10 seconds. Then I switched to the File list, and I can immediately sort by file size to find out the biggest files on my disk!
Seasoned users might say this cygwin command accomplishes the same result:
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| du . 2>/dev/null | sort -nr | less |
But that would probably take 10 minutes instead of 10 seconds!
Many criticize Windows as being not user-friendly to power users – you can’t do things the fast way even when you’ve used it for a couple of years. Here’s some tricks I’ve accumulated over the years to make using Windows (hopefully) as swift as a *nix guru.
Why should we use Windows when we want performance and speed? Well, I guess that’s we game players have to live for
Customize your Run dialog
This is undoubtedly the coolest and most powerful trick for Windows power users. To be able to type whatever command you want from the Windows command prompt is like being able to place symbolic links in /usr/local/bin
- Create a directory somewhere convenient. A good place I used is
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| %HOMEDRIVE%:%HOMEPATH%\Commands |
- Now you’ll want to add this directory to your %PATH%. This is done by:
- Press Win + R to open the Run dialog
- Enter
- Append your
path to %PATH% in Advanced -> Environment Variables
- Now you can place shortcuts (*.lnk) and even BAT files there and they will be run when you type the command in the Run dialog!
Useful commands for the Run dialog
Talking about the Run dialog, there’s a handful of useful commands you may want to memorize to speed things up a little bit:
- notepad
- calc
- Calculator
- explorer
- Opens Windows Explorer on path
- control netconnections
- Opens the Network Connections control panel
- sndvol / sndvol32
- Opens the volume control panel
- sysdm.cpl
- Opens System Properties
- dxdiag
- Opens DirectX Diagnostic
- msinfo32
- Opens System Information
- msnmsgr
- Opens Windows Live Messenger
Enhance your clipboard with ClipX
The clipboard is designed decades ago. Given today’s computers’ memory size, there’s no reason to justify why we can only hold one value in the clipboard. Enhance it with this freeware ClipX. You can store like 25 previous clipboard entries (including pictures, files) and recall them with one key combination (default: Shift-Ctrl-V). Very handy for system admins and programmers
Opening Task Manager directly on Vista
Microsoft changed the popular key combination Alt-Ctrl-Del to open a screen with a list of not very useful options instead of opening the task manager. Here’s the new key combination to open the Task Manager directly:
Locking your computer from the command prompt
There are various reasons you might want to do this instead of Win + L, such as from within a BAT script. Anyway here’s how to do it
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| rundll32 user32.dll, LockWorkStation |
Putting files to the Recycle Bin from the command line
Oops, there’s no tricks to it. Download my recycle utility.
Update: Check out the new tool cmd-recycle which is a lot more robust, written much more cleanly and just more cool!
I wrote this simple utiltiy some while ago, thought I might as well publish it here.
Just copy recycle.exe to WINDOWS\system32 and you can start using
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| recycle <filename>
recycle <filename1> <filename2> <filename3> ...
recycle *
recycle <directory1> ... |
Full source code included (using C#). Enjoy!
Download
