Take Control!

Some people seem to be overtaxed when dealing with computers and mobile phones – which are miniature computers today with large and complex Operating Systems (OS).
In this situation one can grind one’s teeth, use a hatchet on the device, or one can strive to become knowledgeable. The best source of information is, needless to say, the Internet. One does not need books anymore; the large libraries I used to have on programming and computing are a thing of the past. However, one has to watch it: Some forum contributors are just whining and bitching and thus oozing incompetence. But quickly one learns how to find the knowledge databases that offer real help and set an end to the patronizing from developers who think users are morons. (Well, some actually are.)

One of the most common nuisances, without a doubt, are bloated memories. They slow down any device.
Until recently I used a very old – but high-end – Nokia because I was not crazy about touch screen phones, and I had been noticing for some time that the phone memory kept growing over the years. The phone memory backups grew bigger and bigger, from 800 K to 60 MB to be precise, within 4 years. 70 MB were still available, but I wanted to do something about this and find out what the reason was.
So I installed a hacking package (HelloOX2) and got rid of a few logs and unnecessary files.
But something else brought the breakthrough, and it was a very simple step: The phone memory had to be formated. This brought it down to its original size of 800 K again. In other words: It was just fragmented. A simple key combination on startup did the job. Then my customized content of the phone memory had to be restored, and the problem was solved.
A toss-in here was the fact that the last firmware updates were also deleted.

Firmware updates are a big nuisance too, but most people think they are necessary.
The promise is to “address security issues” and “improve compatibility” and “fix minor bugs” etc. But firmware updates are a black box; quite often there is something missing afterwards that one was fond of (e. g. a spell checker), or certain hacks are no longer possible.
So I say: Hands-off. If the device is working fine, there is no need for firmware updates. If you hate patronizing, don’t do firmware updates.

In the Windows world similar problems occur. Windows developers have a very nonchalant attitude towards bloated disks. Each update leaves thousands of files on the computer that are no longer necessary. I have a feeling that developers love to have these traces of former transactions on the users’ hard disks, so they can exert more control and power. If a user says “I have never had this program/picture/video”, they can say “And what is this?”.
In order to keep a hard disk mean and lean, one needs special tools: Registry cleaners, disk wipers, uninstallers and evidence removers that use state-of-the-art methods (e. g. Gutmann; each disk sector is overwritten 35 times). Since a small 1 TB disk contains approx. 1’800 million sectors, secure wiping is a time consuming process.

In addition the following simple measures are recommendable:
1.
Obsolete app icons and program names can be removed from the Notification Area control panel by performing the following steps:
Regedit, search for “IconStreams”, delete “IconStreams” and “PastIconStreams”; terminate and restart explorer.exe in Task Mgr.
2.
A totally useless, very bulky (several GB) and privacy invading file is “hiberfil.sys”. Removing it is easy:
Computer, Windows, System32, Open cmd.exe as administrator, enter “powercfg.exe -h off”, press Enter, and restart.
3.
Obsolete services (no “Path To Executable”) can be removed this way:
Regedit, Local Machine, System, Current Control Set, Services, delete the service’s folder.
“Autoruns” will do even more and delete drivers, processes, demons etc. But one has to be careful: There is no Undo.
4.
The Recovery partition is also perfectly useless, if one uses clones for backing up the OS. It is also very big (around 12 GB).
This is how one can delete it:
Command prompt (cmd.exe), diskpart, list disk, select disk 0, list partition, select partition1, delete partition override.