Clean It Up!

Reviewed by Bill Hughes, LACS

The title of the CD/ROM on the Review table, Clean It Up!, attracted my attention, so I handed over my twenty bucks deposit and took the disk home with me.

There was no documentation with it, but I figured there'd be a file on the disk itself and it would be easy to study it after displaying it with Acrobat Reader or whatever it required. Hah! Was I ever wrong! Nary a word about anything. What do you do in a case like that? How do you prepare yourself to install and use the application when all you know about it is its name?

Mustering a certain amount of courage, you go ahead and insert the CD/ROM into the slot on your machine and cower back. And so what happens? Not much. You get a new icon on your desktop. So you double-click on said new icon and a pretty box appears on your screen showing a red-handled broom over two files and two sheets of paper. The name Clean It Up! appears in big, bold letters, beneath which is a long, thin, blue box with the words "Clean It Up Status - Idle" in the box.

One assumes that this means that the application is ready to go, biding the time when it'll get called up to active duty. Beneath the long, thin, blue box are four buttons. They are labeled "About," "Hide," "Settings," and "Clean It Up!" The "About" button lists the user and his organization, the URL of the producer,  www.xcentricsoft.com and the logo. Not much help there. I hit the "Close" button and go on to the next button.

The next button is titled "Hide." You click on it, and the pretty box with the red and yellow broom vanishes from the screen. That's all. The next button is called "Settings." This one ought to be interesting. Let's see. Click on it and a large dialog box appears with a whole bunch of options you can choose. You can have Clean It Up! work on the Windows startup, you can have it run in the Stealth Mode, you can load the icon in the tray, and you can disable the splash screen. Since the only intimation that Clean It Up! is actually running is the temporary appearance of the splash screen, it would seem to be a pretty good idea to leave the splash screen enabled. This lets you know the program is installed. In addition to these options, the "Settings" screen also lets you choose how often the program runs. I chose once an hour. That might be too often, but perhaps it will be just right. Experience is likely to dictate which setting will be most useful. The largest part of the dialog box lists programs you can select to have Clean It Up! do its thing to. This is not a list that Clean It Up! made up after examining your computer. It is a pre-formed list and includes lots of stuff you may not have - like Opera, for instance. I think that Opera is a first rate browser, myself; it is fast and it is lean; and it isn't an expansion of Mosaic, the original browser. But I only know three or four people who actually use it. So it is neat to know that Clean It Up! includes it on the list of stuff that it can clean up. You go down the list and check those programs you want Clean It Up! to work on, or you can check another part of the dialog box to have ALL the options selected, or ALL DEFAULT options selected, or NONE of them. Since you can't really tell that Clean It Up! is doing anything, it would seem that selecting ALL options would be the best place to start. An ADVANCED OPTIONS button allows you to select programs that are on floppies, for example. I know that I have a couple of floppies with programs that aren't just exactly perfect and maybe, just maybe, they could be set right by Clean It Up! But it'd be an awful good idea to make backup copies first!

The remaining button says "Clean It Up!" When you press it, your hard drive does a bit of stuttering and the blue status bar just above the buttons sweeps back and forth, well, maybe only forth, a few times, and then all is quiet, and perhaps your hard drive is cleansed of a bunch of extraneous junk.

I can't tell if it works or not. My suspicion is that it does work and that it is innocuous and very little bother. It would seem pretty sensible to give it a try and see if you like it.

I was unable to find it on the shelves of dealers around, so perhaps it is only marketed on the net, but that's enough. You can download a trial copy, good for two weeks, to see if you like it, from the web site, http://www.xcentricsoft.com, and can register it for the payment of only $20. The price is low, and free upgrades are promised. You might want to try it!

Corporate office: Xcentric Technologies Inc, 7108 Katella Av, #414, Stanton, CA, 90680-4368, Fax: (714) 979-0121. ¨