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I frequently will take Windows drives that are junked up by viruses, malware and general usage over to other machines in order to remove the infections, etc. vs fighting the battle on the machine in which it's installed. Obviously this is a huge timesaver, however I would like to have a quick method to clean up cruft before running scans. This would be temp folders and browser caches, etc. Honestly I'd even like the option to eliminate (not that I always want to do this) Windows restore data.
I can't seem to find a utility that will do this for external drives. There are, of course, plenty of options for removing them on an active system such as CCleaner and Advanced SystemCare to even Window's own Disk Cleanup, but none that I have found so far work on an external volume. Do any such tools exist that I'm overlooking?
ylluminate
Posted 2014-05-10T17:57:47.040
Reputation: 760
This borders on the line of a software recommendation which doesn't typically fly here - but one generic option I can give you is to make some scripts (powershell or batch) to automate a lot of what you're talking about. It'd definitely be a fun project to teach you some basic scripting if you're not already familiar. – Bradley Forney – 2014-05-10T18:01:51.820
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You could always try asking this over here which may get you better results if you're looking for something pre-built: https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/
– Bradley Forney – 2014-05-10T18:02:49.2671@BradleyForney I am really excited to see the Software Recommendations section that has been created. This has been sorely needed and one of the things that has always very much upset me about the narrowness of the StackExchange network. – ylluminate – 2014-05-10T18:15:01.477
CCleaner does a great job getting rid of the files you don't need and serve no other purpose except to make software faster. I am not exactly sure what the question is exactly though. Seems like you should remove the problem child ( malware ) then boot to the disk to do everything else. – Ramhound – 2014-05-10T18:27:01.980
The point of this @Ramhound is to speed up the detection and defragmentation process that is run externally on the machines. It goes much faster when I can run scans on several machines overnight like this at once and cleaning out cruft first accelerates this process. – ylluminate – 2014-05-10T18:33:37.513
Hdvalet and ccleaner both have always had ability to set your own items out, drive folder wildcard all the stuff needed to script out "other stuff" with a GUI , be it on the internal and system or on any other drive. In Ccleaner it is in Options Include. – Psycogeek – 2014-05-10T19:42:24.437