| How to Clean Up Your Computer's Hard Drive |
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Even today’s huge hard drives get filled up with junk and slow down the system. Whether you’re drive is nearly full and you want to recover some space or if your computer is running sluggishly, cleaning up the hard drive will help dramatically.
Before you start deleting files and uninstalling applications, use the Disk Cleanup tool to get rid of the unnecessary clutter such as temporary files, Recycle Bin files, and memory dump files.
To access this tool, go to the Start Button and right-click it. Choose Explore from the sub-menu. Now, find the disk that you’d like to cleanup, most likely the C: drive. Right-click this disk and choose Properties. A dialog box appears showing you exactly how much space is used and how much is free space. Press the button that says Disk Cleanup. The Disk Cleanup wizard will start by scanning the disk for files that have served their purpose and can safely be deleted. Once the scan is complete, you’ll see a display filled with categories and check boxes as well as an estimate of how much space you’ll gain by deleting the category of files. Common files to delete include Recycle Bin files, temporary Internet files, temporary files, debug dump files, and setup log files. If you want to remove these files, make sure a check mark is in the box and click Remove.
The Disk Cleanup wizard will now remove all marked files. If that process didn’t recover as much space as you had hoped, you can go back into the Disk Cleanup utility and take further steps. Repeat the process by right-clicking the disk and choosing properties. Click Disk Cleanup once again. This time, go to the “More Options” tab. From here, you can take more drastic measures to clean up your hard disk.
For example, you can remove all but the latest System Restore points as well as uninstall various applications and features. To remove programs that you no longer need, click the “Cleanup” button next to Programs and Features. This will bring up a list of all installed programs that can be uninstalled. Pick the application that you’d like to remove, highlight it, and click “Uninstall.” Make sure not to remove any Windows updates, security patches, or hotfixes as doing so will compromise your computer’s security and performance.
System Restore makes a copy of your computer’s settings and saves them according to predetermined points of time. Over time, you can have multiple copies taking up space on your hard drive. If you have Windows Vista, you might also have shadow copies and disk images taking up huge chunks of disk space. By clearing out the oldest restore points, you can free a great deal of disk space on your computer.
If you still need more disk space, consider removing some of your larger files such as digital photos. With today’s digital cameras taking photos with huge file sizes, it doesn’t take long before your photo collection grows out of hand. Burn your photos to DVD or store them on removable USB flash drives if practical.
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