Maintenance Your Windows Machine Like a Pro

You are probably here because you have a Windows machine that is getting slower and slower. Doing maintenance and optimization on your own requires time, research, and knowledge to do it right and avoid having additional Windows issues. I know the pain of having a Windows machine and doing maintenance. 😅

Let me share one story with you; one time, I tried to do basic cleaning to my Windows machine using Disk Cleanup, and I checked all the items there and deleted them so I could free up some space. Do you know what happened? --- Blue Screen of Death shows! 🤦‍♂️

With this wonderful experience using Windows, I motivated myself to learn how to effectively do maintenance and optimization without breaking my computer. I know that's a funny reason, but that's my inspiration; that's why I created a tool that automates the optimization and maintenance of a Windows computer. 🤘

🧹 Cleaning Tool

Introducing the WRN Cleaner! 🎉🎉🎉

It is a maintenance tool that can automatically or manually clean up your Windows machine and reliably. It is designed specifically for Windows machines only. The motivation behind this project is to clean up Windows machines in an automated way with pre-configured optimization techniques. 😉💻🧹

⚡ Features

I'm using the native approach in cleaning Windows machines compared to other tools out there. Check out the different native Windows utilities to automate the maintenance and optimization. 🔥

Here's the cleaning process in sequence. 🧹

• Disk Cleanup

• Defragment (HDD)

• Retrim (SSD)

• Checks System File

• Cleans Recycle Bin

• Cleans Temp Folder

• Cleans Prefetch Folder

• Clears Windows Error Log

• Auto or Manual Shutdown and Reboot When Done

Disk Cleanup - As you may have noticed, I placed the Disk Cleanup at the top of the cleaning process; why? My reason is that this is the only native maintenance utility in Windows that needs user interaction. Getting the user's attention to finish all the steps before leaving the program running is good. Placing the Disk Cleanup somewhere in the process will prevent the whole process from finishing if the user is away from the keyboard, causing the program to hang and unable to complete the cleaning process. Make sense? 😅

Defrag / Retrim - Last year, I bought an SSD to upgrade my workstation, but here's the question: can I defrag my SSD? The answer is no! It has been a requested feature of the tool to support SSD-enabled Windows machines. I started to research this feature request and found out that Windows' Defrag utility software has an optimization feature that works with SSDs, which is the Retrim! The tool can safely detect and apply the necessary optimization for your storage device. 🤘

System File Checker - Built-in utility for Windows machines for checking and restoring corrupted system files. That's it! 😅

Recycle Bin / Temp Folder / Prefetch Folder - The tool cleans your recycle bin, temp folder and files, and prefetch folder to free up some storage. 👊

Windows Error Log - This can help reduce the noise in your Windows logs by deleting old error logs. 🤝

⚠ Reminder: It is recommended to use this tool once every month.

🧰 Maintenance

Now we have the tool, and we don't have to worry about making the same mistake I made. 🤣 It is so simple to use my cleaning tool. Follow the usage below... 👀

1. Get the latest stable version.

2. Run the batch script file as an Administrator.

3. Follow the on-screen instructions.

4. Wait...

5. Done!

⚠ Reminder: When you start to run the program the first cleaning method would be DiskClean so be careful on this one, don't check or uncheck things here. It is set to the default configuration and all you have to do is to click ok or next.

🔐 Security

Some of you may know that I'm a cybersecurity researcher by trade, and security is very important to me. The maintenance tool I made is safe to use as I'm also using it, I mean you can read the entire source code in the official GitHub repository. 😅

In addition, you can check the VirusTotal result here. 😉

If, in any case, you find a potential security bug, then feel free to reach out to me.

☝️ Last Words

Having a Windows machine can be painful, but this is where I started, and this is all I have. I'm planning to install a new machine with Windows OS soon. Yeah, I'm very comfortable with Windows as my main personal computer. I would probably use an Apple machine for work as it is very reliable in that use case, but that's soon. 🤞

Cleaning your machine can be painful too if you don't know the basics, that's where the tools become useful. Don't rely too much on tools; still, you have to learn the basics. 👊

The tool I made uses the native cleaning process for Windows. I just automated these steps and applied my years of experience in maintaining and optimizing Windows machines as I worked before as technical support. ⚡

So yeah, I hope you learned a lot, and this blog helps!

Docs: docs.warengonzaga.com/wrn-cleaner

Repo: github.com/warengonzaga/wrn-cleaner

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📢 Nominate me (@warengonzaga) as a GitHub Star. If you appreciate my hard work, passion, and dedication to open-source projects like this.

Cheers! 🚀👌 See you on my next blog...