The point is to prevent recovery of data from sensitive files that you've deleted.

That means it will overwrite the free space with random data. The last disk-cleaning option is a bit different-it offers to 'bleach' the free space on selected drives. I ran all of these cleanup operations on my test system. You can have it delete the most recently used file lists for over a hundred third-party programs. It wipes out the cache, history, cookies, and other browsing traces for Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Netscape, and Mozilla.

It erases a number of history lists that Windows maintains, as well as various temporary files. 'Clean Your Disks,' the remaining item under the Optimize category, offers a variety of different ways to clean up traces of your computer and browsing history. My Symantec contact explained that their current technology 'didn't have full coverage for all of the versions of operating systems we wanted to support.' For now, Windows Defragmenter is what you get, so I ran it and defragged the test system. The old Norton Utilities had its own defragmenter called Speed Disk, and PC Tools also offers a disk suite that includes defragmentation. I was somewhat surprised to find the Windows Defragmenter listed as an option for optimization. Norton Utilities offers to manage your startup, but it doesn't offer any particular advice the way it did for services. You also take a performance hit when too many programs launch at startup and keep running in the background. And of course you can undo either change. It can also cut back to a minimal set of services for raw speed, possibly at the expense of some functionality. Norton Utilities offers to manage your services by turning off all but a carefully selected set of recommended ones. Turning off the wrong service can bring Windows to a crashing halt, so in general only experts should consider making changes in this area.

Unnecessary Windows services running in the background can slow system performance, but most users have no idea what is and isn't necessary. I ran the Defragment Your Registry tool, which said it could shrink the Registry by eight percent while defragmenting it. Like the file system on disk the Registry can get fragmented, possibly making for slower Registry access. Windows and programs are constantly adding, changing, and deleting items in the Registry. I let it fix all the errors knowing that if by some mischance this cleanup caused a problem another of the tools would let me roll back those changes.

To start I launched 'Clean Your Registry', which found almost 200 distinct errors (erroneous or useless data) in the Registry. I ran every single feature on the Optimize panel and let them do their good work. The product's many features are organized into four main panels: Optimize, Monitor, Windows Tools, and Administer.

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Norton utilities 14 problems