more space saving tips

something that has become somewhat overlooked as time has marched on is disk defragmentation. it used to be a pretty big deal to defrag your computer, and depending on the computer, it could have been a lengthy process, something you had to do and couldn't do anything on the computer while it was going. it sucked

on my vista computer, it automatically performs a defrag at 4am every morning. it's beyond my knowledge what exactly defraging does, but think of it like this; you have a lawn in fall, theres leaves all over it. Are you going to see more grass if you rake them all into a nice pile? yep. That's defraging, except instead of a lawn, it's your hard drive, and instead of leaves, its bits and bytes of memory

so, in order to defrag, press start, all programs, accessories, system tools, disk defragmenter. In the window that pops up, click on analyze, and it will let you know whether or not you should defrag. If you should, all you have to do is click Defragment, and you're all set

This next trick is for people who download things using P2P software; limewire, bearshare, azureus, utorrent, etc. I see this with my mom all the time, she'll download an album, copy it to her ipod, then leave the music on her hard drive, thinking its gone. tisk tisk mother.

My downloading program is Utorrent, its a great program. Every program you use to download things is going to have whats called a default directory, this is the folder that all your downloads go to. To find your default directory, the option to change it is usually in to be found in a "preferences", "options" or "settings" menu. Just make sure if you're downloading things, you keep track of where what you downloaded is. Say you download season 2 of the sarah connor chronicles, and it's zipped, well after you unzip it, the original zip file doesn't just dissapear, you still have to go back and delete it, otherwise you'll have the season zipped and unzipped, just taking up space when it's not being used

Speaking of downloads, keep in mind when you're downloading songs, if the extension is FLAC, it's going to take up A LOT more room then a wav, or mp3, just keep that in mind. Also I've noticed with video that .rm extensions are usually bigger as well (pesky realplayer, blah)

If you're a picture person, those can add up to a lot of space very quickly. You might try something like uploading all your pictures to a site that will host them for free like flickr, or even facebook and myspace. After they've been uploaded, you could delete them off your hard drive and that'd be that. If for whatever reason you needed to email the pictures, or wanted to edit them, all you'd have to do is go to the picture, right click and save image as, and you have it again on your hard drive

Another idea is say you have a large number of files you don't want to get rid of, but dont really ever look at, like a bunch of old word documents, powerpoints, and midis, you could use a program like winzip, winace, or 7zip to zip them all up and then thats more room saved

There are tons of little ways to clear up room, but nothing beats simply deleting the files you dont want, or dont use. Just make sure you know exactly what you're deleting, and you'll be just fine. Hope this helped some people, till next time