Disk Cleanup/ Defrag Individual Stations

Hi

When you log in to a computer on a network, and you start disk cleanup or defragmenter or any other system tool from your Start>Programs>Accessories menu you are accessing programs 'locally' and are telling them to work on the 'local' machine. 'Local' refers to the computer you are sat at. So these commands will only affect the computer you are starting them from.

You may have read about remote management and terminal services - these create user environments which are started from a local PC and which then connect to a server or a networked PC and usually require a password. So it should be obvious if you are connected to a remote machine. Also, the window will usually tell you it is connected to \\xxxx.

When running 'local' programs they usually say they are working on Drive C, which is the default letter assigned to the local hard drive that contains the OS.

Do not hesitate to post any other questions/comments. There are a lot of folks here who have a lot of good advice.

Hope this helps

Depends on the drive you select ie it could be a shared network drive, otherwise most likely the c:\ drive would usually be local.

You may have problems depending on the setup also, you may need to be an Administrator ( local ) to access some of the files on the local machine.

You may also do some damage as a Network Administrator if your not completely sure what you are doing when deleting files.

If you job is Network Adminstrator might be worth doing some sort of course.

disk cleanup usually deletes downloaded program files, offline web pages, temp internet files, the recycle bin, temp files left by installer programs and are for the computer you run disk cleanup on. Disk defragging also is for the computer you run the utility on.

These maintenance programs can be scheduled to run using the scheduled tasks system tool[s] during a time no one is using the computer. Disk defrag can degrade performance e.g. slow computer response due to the program reading and writing to the disk to arrainging files and is best done during off hours. Disk clean up is a relatively short time duration process. These maintenance tasks should not be done at a time that antivirus scans take place.

None will effect other computers on the network provided that the drives you choose are not mapped network shares to other computers [don't need to defrag those anyways].