Dustcloths, mops and Hoovers for your PC

North Americans and Europeans have a tradition they call spring cleaning. As their winters fade, homes take advantage of the warmer weather to throw out the junk that has accumulated, and scrub away the grime, dust and oily stove hoods.

To qualify for bragging rights about spring cleaning, I rolled up those sleeves and performed a full cleanup on June 20. That got me in hours before the June solstice that officially began summer just after noon on Sunday, and sparked the annual stories in the downmarket press about the hottest day of the year.

Irony alert: Following my spring cleaning, I had to do more cleanups than I did the first time. This year I wanted to do some serious testing of some spiffy new cleanup software. I found there was quite a lot of it around, and some of it is very nice indeed.

One thing I really liked this year is the appearance of some excellent, up-to-date tools that do one thing. There are also some great all-in-one tools to give the wonderful CCleaner and FCleaner some competition, and one humongous clean-up suite that I really liked a lot, despite my preference for sharp-edged tools.

Temp File Cleaner, for example, is a compact program that describes itself well. It is written in Java, so it works on pretty well all types of computers, and of course like almost all the software I  review, it's free.

It's easy to operate ``out of the box'' and has only a few advanced options that really needn't concern you unless you wish. Basically, it searches all disks on your computer for unneeded trash left behind by various programs including web browsers, and gets rid of it.

You should look at the program's basic choices. You should always delete the temporary Internet files and empty the recycle bin, of course, but you may want to think carefully about whether to delete cookies. You get a cleaner disk, but you also have to start all over at your favourite websites by logging in and so on.

A simple dusting of the temporary files will regain you an astounding amount of disk space if you haven't done it for a while. Plus, the actual Windows temp folder can get full if it is totally ignored, and eventually can get  so big and confusing that it can affect or even halt your computing. This is where Windows dumps, but does not delete, anything from installation programs to temporary backups.

Bleachbit was a top candidate for ``find of the project'' when I went looking for compact and simple clean-up tools.

It is specifically designed to clean up after programs, including some of the messiest ones such as Skype, Adobe Reader, all the browsers and Google Earth. But those are just examples, and Bleachbit can find a lot of junk in a lot of obscure places and make your computer run more efficiently, with additional disk space thrown in as a bonus.

The utility was developed a while back for Linux _ yes, it leaves messes, too _ but now has been ported to Windows. The website warns the Windows version is still being tested, but it worked fine for me on two machines.

I used Bleachbit right after using two other more general cleanup programs. I used it conservatively, to clean up after my web browsers and some space hogs like Adobe. And I still recovered 280MB of dead disk space.

One feature needs notice. Bleachbit has no ``whoops'' button. When you tell it to get rid of files, it really gets rid of them, securely, and you will not get them back.

Apart from that, it's a bit of a geek's  dream, with lots of themes to change the look, and about 20 different language options, although not Thai.

If you use a lot of the programs in Bleachbit's cleanup list, I think you might want to keep this software around for a while.

It's always difficult to get through a utilities roundup without at least one from the brilliant Nir Sofer, and this was no exception.

CleanAfterMe is a small, superbly portable utility that leaves no stone unturned in cleaning up all signs that you have used a computer at all.

The obvious use is to carry the program on a USB drive and use it as the last step in a session in a cybercafe or business centre.

But the program is an excellent, if quick-and-dirty, replacement for CCleaner.

Presuming you give it permission, it delves into all the garbage left behind by Windows Explorer, the two top browsers, places like the recycle bin and even the clipboard.

But this 38-kilobyte (no typo there) software is also hard-coded to clean up after Microsoft Office including the hugely popular 2003 edition, as well as both Outlook and the later Live Mail.

Next week: A surprising new entry in the clean-up section of the software store.

Temp File Cleaner is explained and illustrated at software.addpcs.com/tfc

Bleachbit's modest home page has a list of programs it cleans up after at bleachbit-project.appspot.com, and yes, there is a hyphen just before project.

For CleanAfterMe, scroll down at this  web page, which is worth a look even if you don't want this specific utility (www.nirsoft.net/utils)

Email: wandasloan@gmail.com