Cleaning up hard drives

[GT40FIED]

Ok...I'm attempting to clean up my hard drive and the drive on my brother's computer. Can someone refresh me on how to (safely) delete cookie files? I haven't done it since I ran Win 95. I've got XP and he's got either Win 98 or ME and I don't even know where to start with either one. Any help would be much appreciated.

[Racing Rice]

For XP you can right click on IE properties and theres a "Delete Cookies" button.

In 98 you can browse to the Temporary Internet Files folder and just select the cookies you dont want (or all of them) and delete them.

Both machines should also have a Start --> Programs --> Accessories --> System Tools --> Disk Cleanup

You can run that, it will clean your drive up pretty well. I would also run Disk Defragmenter, it too should be under System Tools.

[blind34_1]

How about you back up all of your personal files and such and do a complete partition wipe and reformat. That's the best way to "clean up".

[failcaleb]

There are also some good apps out there that you can use to get rid of temporary internet files, cookies, and spyware. I use a program called BPS Spyware removal to get rid of cookies and spyware. It also has a pretty good pop-up stopper. Their url is http://www.bulletproofsoft.com