This website shows you various system utilities that you can use to make your PC perform “like new” again.
Effective Ways to Freeing Up Disk Space
The History of Disk Space Management
If you've been around the PC industry for a while, you might remember what a huge problem disk space was, say 15-18 years ago. Back than, the average 3x86 had a hard disk capacity of roughly around 40 MB (yes, megs not gigs) that somehow always got clogged up with stuff in a matter of weeks after a format. Back then, everyone was thinking all this disk space management trouble would be over when hard disks will have the capacity to store several thousand megabytes or more. Well that day came and the problem is still not solved.
The increase in hard disk capacity was directly proportional with the increase in size of operation systems, programs, games, movies, music and so forth. So now that we've seen that the problem of low disk space can't be fully eradicated, let's talk about some popular ways of eluding it.
Obvious Stuff
There are two basic, obvious methods of freeing up disk space that many people skip and jump straight to more complicated (and probably less effective) methods. Number 1 is emptying your recycle bin.
I've been asked by several friends or colleagues that weren't particularly tech wise to come see why their PC is clogging up. When I got to check it, I noticed that their Windows partition had only a few bytes of free space, which was causing the system to clog up in endless temporary file replacements (it's advisable to keep at least a gigabyte of free space on your Windows partition for temporary files, or your PC might slow down severely).
The problem was not that they had stored a lot of stuff on that particular partition, but because they never emptied their recycle bin. It's usually best to perform a recycle bin “incineration” every week but if you don't want that to trouble you, you can choose to remove files instantly when you delete something instead of sending them to the bin. Right click on the recycle bin icon on your desktop, select properties, click on the “Global” tab and check the “Do not move files to the Recycle Bin” box and you're set.
Another obvious method of freeing up some disk space without going into more advanced methods is simply deleting unused programs, movies, mp3s, games and so forth.
When you do this however, please don't simply go to where the program or game was installed and click delete. This will only delete the files in that specific directory, but it won't delete any links, windows registry items or any additional information that the respective program or game created when installed.
Instead, go to “Control Panel” and choose “Add/Remove Programs”, find the program or game in the list and uninstall it. Alternatively, you can use the program's uninstaller (provided it has one). Still, you can delete any movies, mp3s or other media files directly since they don't create any back links or registry information.
Not so Obvious Stuff
Ok let's get into some more advanced methods of freeing up disk space. Only resort to these if the “obvious” ones didn't work, or if you need additional space.
Hibernation – if you ever set your PC on hibernation for power saving reasons, the Operating System immediately allotted some disk space for it. Even if you don't use it, the hibernation process will still eat up that memory space (it can be between 512 MB and 1024 MB). Right click on your desktop, choose properties, click on the “Screen Saver” tab, then click on the “Power” button and uncheck “Enable Hibernation”.
System Restore – the System Restore is a method that Windows uses to keep backup on your system files as a safety measure for unwanted problems. A good thing in concept, but if you take even slight care of your PC (and use some good protection programs) you will hardly use it.
The problem with system restore is that it eats right through your disk space. You can turn it off completely (although it's not advisable) or you can simply set it to a lower output, which will save you a lot of disk space. To do so, click on “Control Panel”, choose “System” from the list of programs, click on the “System Restore” tab and select the drive you want to free up space for and choose “Settings”.
You can tune down the System restore monitoring level for each partition to a value between 0% and 12% with 12% being full protection (that's 12% of the partition's disk space).
Temporary Internet Files and Cookies – a lot of space is used when surfing the Internet for storing several types of data needed for various sites or by your browser. These files are temporary stored onto your system partition and usually get erased at the first reboot, but not always. In order to clear up your temporary Internet files and cookies, you can go to “Control Panel”, select “Internet Options” and you will notice that the “General” tab holds a middle paragraph called “Temporary Internet Files” and 3 buttons.
The Delete Cookies button does what it says, the Delete Files button erases all the current temporary Internet files on your PC and the “Settings” button allows you to allot a specific amount of disk space to be used with storing future temp files.
Prefetch Files – This method is only available for PCs using Windows XP versions. The operating system uses these so called “prefetch files” in order to speed up the boot process and it accumulates all the information of all specific programs used in this process in the “C:\Windows\Prefetch” folder (if you installed Windows on a different partition, replace “C:\” accordingly).
Over time, a lot of junk can form up here so you can simply select everything inside the folder and delete it. This can also help speed up your PC a bit and don't worry about losing any booting speed, as Windows will rebuild the contents of the prefetch folder as needed.