Doing computer maintenace (clean up) and have a question.
Sunday, December 18, 2011 by Philly0381 | Discussion: Personal Computing
Hey folks. Like most of you I try to keep my personal computer clean of unwanted nasties and running in a smooth and orderly fashion. We all know that means running antivirus and antimalware scans, getting rid of junk files, cleaning up registry and defraggintg and doing a backup for those occasions where a regroup is needed.
I have noticed that the one particular clean up program I use, Auslogics BootSpeed, has an option or function to look at identifying Duplicate Files so you can clean them up and free up whatever space they were taking.
So my question is do any of you look duplicate files and what if any problems could I run into by deleting them.
Thanks for your help.
Reply #2 Sunday, December 18, 2011 1:15 PM
Yep, Wiz is right. Never remove duplicate files unless you know exactly what they are and do.
Reply #3 Sunday, December 18, 2011 2:04 PM
With disk storage sizes being huge, I wouldn't.
The screw-up/benefit ratio is huge (ie... lots of screw-up for little benefit).
A much more profitable action would be registry defrag and disk smart defrag before doing your back-ups, as well as eliminating unnecessary start up programs if speed's a concern.
Reply #4 Sunday, December 18, 2011 2:15 PM
Well I think the replies pretty much covered it.
Doc, I do those before backing up, but a good reminder for folks. 
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Reply #1 Sunday, December 18, 2011 1:13 PM
I do look at them but unless they are walls or music/video I do not remove duplicates.
Many of these files need to be in more than one location. The amount of space they take up isn't large enough to worry about it and removing them can cause issues with proper operation of some software, including Windows.