Tips to clear space on your hard drive

Hello, today I'm gonna talk about some relatively simple ways to clear space on your hard drive. These are things that I do usually about once a month, but maybe that's a little bit of my crazy OCD coming out :)

***note that this applies to windows computers

The first and probably easiest thing to do is to clear your temp folders. First, click the start button, and on the bottom right you should see an option that says 'run'. click that. (if you don't see it, or are running vista, the hotkey is windowskey+r). In the run box type "temp", and just go nuts! Seriously everything in here can and should be deleted. These files can slow down your computer when you're starting up and can bog down some programs load time. If you've never done this before you may be surprised at how many files there can be.

Next, get back to your run box, and this time type in %temp%, this will bring up another temp folder with more files to delete, again, all perfectly safe to delete.

Performing these two steps alone on my friend who's computer was a year old and had never been cleaned before cleared off 1.4 gigs for him.


So, another trick: disk cleanup:
First step is to get to 'My Computer'. I have a shortcut to My Computer right on my desktop, but you can also access it by clicking the start button, and you should see it on the top right hand corner. Now go to 'Local Disk(C:)' and right click, go down to 'properties'.

On the 'General' tab you'll see a pie chart showing how much used and free space you have on that drive. To the right of that chart you'll see 'Disk Cleanup', click that. A little box will appear to scan how much space you can free up, let it do it's thing, sometimes it can take a really long time if you don't do this too often.

You can go ahead and check everything, and it will let you know how much space will be cleared up. As I'm sitting on this school computer in the library, it Disk Cleanup is saying it will clean up 6,861,745kb, that's about 6861mb, or 6.8gb. That's a lot of space just being wasted. This computer has a 140gb harddrive, and 6.8 of that is being wasted, so just go ahead and click ok when you're ready. It may take a while, especially if you're having it compress old files, but its worth it.


Next is a more personalized section, in that not everyone is going to be able to clear out as much space. A lot of times I'll download programs that I'll only use once or twice, like a program to edit a .gif, or one to splice a video, or I'll just download a program to check it out like google earth. Well you do that enough and eventually you'll have a lot of files sitting on your c drive that you never use.

To remedy this, click your start button, and go to the 'Control Panel' on the right hand side. Go to "add or remove programs". Now take a look at the list, comb through it, and delete what you dont use by clicking the "Change/Remove" button. BUT! you must be careful here. General rule of thumb unless you really know what you're doing is that if you don't know what it is or what it does, leave it alone. You don't want to uninstall something important.


If you did, you could always use system restore, which will lead me into my last trick: adjusting the amount of space reserved for system restore.

Unless you are really confident in your computing skills, or everything important you have is backed up externally, or you just plain dont care and want the space, I wouldn't recommend doing this. If you don't know, system restore can be used if your computer has become infected, or if you deleted an important system file accidently, to bring your computer back to the state it was at a certain "restore point"

A restore point is like a point in time where your computers files are frozen, and saved in memory. You run system restore and go to the restore point you wanted to, let it do it's thing, and then that will take care of a lot of problems. This is a very powerful and very useful tool

Unfortunately to do this requires quite a bit of space on your hard drive. This computer uses 12%...18gb, to hold the restore points. It's possible to greatly reduce this, but again, let me warn you that unless you're externally backed up this might not be the best idea...but lets learn anyways!

click your start button --> all programs --> accessories --> system tools --> system restore

this will bring up the system restore window, where you can click "System Restore Settings" on the left hand side of the screen. This brings up another window, where you can click "Settings" on the right hand side. This window that pops up will have a slider on it that adjusts how much space is reserved for restore points. If you completely disable it, then you WILL NOT BE ABLE TO USE SYSTEM RESTORE. If you lower it from whatever it is, you will have fewer restore points, lowering the chances of system restore being useful. You have to be careful here, but this has the potential to free up a lot of space


So I've gone over 4 different ways to clear space on your hard drive. Cleaning your temp folders, disk cleanup, uninstalling old programs, and system restore settings. There are of course many other ways to clear space off, I'll go over some more later.

till then,
may the force be with you!