AUGUST TUTOR ■

FIND THE ORPHAN

find the
orphan
Don’t you find it irritating that software that was deleted from your PC over a year ago, has left
files scattered across your hard disk, taking up space, for often no reason at all. If you’re hard dri-
ve is presently suffering from severe space limitations then the Find Orphans utility, available from
pcmagazine.com, and included on next month’s CD, may just be the answer.

hen you uninstall a pro g r a m , Windows 95, 98, NT 4.0, and 2000. It was ities. A link to download the utility and

W supporting files sometimes re-

main on your system. Some
uninstall programs simply fail
i n s p i red by the earlier PC Magazine util-
ity FDDLLS, but it’s a ground-up rewrite.
An article about how to use FindOr-
its source code also can be found there .
Also look out for the Find Orphan util-
ity on the September CD-ROM—along
to remove all of their support files. Oth- phans and how it was written is available with the other essential utilities that we
ers offer you a choice: either re m o v e on our Web site at www.pcmag.com/util- include every month.
the shared file (and risk disaster), or
keep it. When a support file no longer
has any dependent programs, that file is
an orphan. It’s taking up space on your
h a rd drive without any purpose. When
one of a program’s support files goes
missing, that’s another kind of pro b l e m ;
the program can’t run.
FindOrphans scans all of your local
h a rd drives and analyses the depen-
HOW TO GET THE FILES
dency relationships among the files. It PC Magazine utilities and other Solu- For more downloads and regional con-
also can scan and remember the files tions files are available on the Inter- tent, visit www.pcmag-mideast .com.
on any number of removable disks. Af- net and of course with every issue, on At www.pcmag-mideast .com/cd.html
ter the scanning process is complete, it our free cover CD. you can access some of the utilities,
will identify orphan files and pro b l e m games and business and Internet soft-
files, and provide a way to safely and re- VIA THE INTERNET ware that is made available on the
v e r s i b l y r e m o v e o r p h an s . Th i s r e - For Utilities, go to www. p c m a g cover CD.
versibility is very important, as some- .com/utilities. For other Solutions
times files can appear to be orphans files, go to www.pcmag.com and click The FindOrphans utility will be in-
when they are not. on Downloads. cluded on the September CD-ROM.
F indOrphans runs under Micro s o f t

92 August 2000 www.DITnet.co.ae ■ www.pcmag-mideast.com

 ■ AUGUST TUTOR
FIND THE ORPHAN

SWEEP AWAY
THE SCRAPS
Two root nodes appear in the tree in the left-
1 most pane: Local drives and Removable disks.
Each subtree contains an Explorer-like tree of folders
and files. Only folders that contain at least one EXE or
DLL file appear in the tree.

Red icons mark orphans: The

2 file selected is not marked as
an orphan, but the files that depend
on it (under Supports...) are orphans.
Their entries in the left pane are
marked with red icons. When those
files are removed, the highlighted
file becomes an orphan itself.

Move files to the Orphan Bin by pressing Ctrl-Del.

Problem files, such as the one highlighted here,
3 are missing other files that they depend on. The
missing files are shown in red in the Depends on... list in
the middle pane.
4 You can restore files from the Orphan Bin if you
discover they are needed after all. Once you’re sure the
files aren’t needed, you can permanently delete them.

www.DITnet.co.ae ■ www.pcmag-mideast.com August 2000 93