Nick
08-03-06, 10:57 AM
I'm doing some housekeeping on my laptop pc and need to resolve a question concerning the elimination of a rather large number of duplicate files. I've already removed a bunch of .tmp and zero-length files
I've just run System Mechanic 5 (SM5) to scan, locate and list duplicate files. According to the scan results, my pc has more than 1GB of duplicate files, totaling some 7,090 files. The file sizes range from 18MB down to 1 KB, The problem I have is identifying which of the dups are unneeded, if any, and which are critical.
The SM5 application makes no recommendations, and I can't tell which are which, and even if I could, with some 3,000 duplicate groups, there are just too many groups to review individually. The paths are all different, but among the several hundred duplicate groups I reviewed, the file names, file types, file sizes and dates modified were all exactly the same. Some of the files predate the initial BIOS date of the machine. One file, "update.exe", an app in the Windows Service Pack Setup was located with 12 different paths.
My questions are:
1. Having a long list generated by SM5, is there a way to safely identify which duplicate files, if any, are safe to remove and which should (must?) stay put?
2. Are there general (or specific) rules for deleting dup files?
3. What ever happened to the "shared-files" concept, which I thought was supposed to minimize the number of dup files?
4. Even though I have over .5 GB of my resources taken up by dup files, should I pursue the issue, or just fahgitaboutit?
tia
I've just run System Mechanic 5 (SM5) to scan, locate and list duplicate files. According to the scan results, my pc has more than 1GB of duplicate files, totaling some 7,090 files. The file sizes range from 18MB down to 1 KB, The problem I have is identifying which of the dups are unneeded, if any, and which are critical.
The SM5 application makes no recommendations, and I can't tell which are which, and even if I could, with some 3,000 duplicate groups, there are just too many groups to review individually. The paths are all different, but among the several hundred duplicate groups I reviewed, the file names, file types, file sizes and dates modified were all exactly the same. Some of the files predate the initial BIOS date of the machine. One file, "update.exe", an app in the Windows Service Pack Setup was located with 12 different paths.
My questions are:
1. Having a long list generated by SM5, is there a way to safely identify which duplicate files, if any, are safe to remove and which should (must?) stay put?
2. Are there general (or specific) rules for deleting dup files?
3. What ever happened to the "shared-files" concept, which I thought was supposed to minimize the number of dup files?
4. Even though I have over .5 GB of my resources taken up by dup files, should I pursue the issue, or just fahgitaboutit?
tia