How to Free up Lost Disk Space
Written by admin on April 4, 2009
An unfortunate side-effect of the functionality built into both windows XP and Windows Vista which protects the computer user from accidental loss of data relates to the fact, that over time, an increasing amount of redundant data is left behind. This data takes up space on the hard drive and can eventually grow to a size of several gigabytes.
To free up the optimum amount of space it is important that every user cleans out this unwanted data, allowing them to free up larger amounts of usable hard disk space. Possibly the best way to automatically clean this of data is to use one of the excellent cleaning utilities available. Arguably the best free software to perform this administrative task is the popular application named CCleaner. The best of the paid solutions is the extremely successful Tune-up Utilities 2008. Both of these applications do an excellent job of clearing down most redundant data although they are far from perfect.
As mentioned above there are utilities available to clear out this old data but none of them clean everything. There are two areas of the Windows file system which require manual cleaning. The first of these relates to the Windows Update website. If you browse to the folder C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution you will find it contains several subfolders which can contain several hundred megabytes of redundant data. This data is downloaded as part of the Windows Update routine, and once all updates have been installed is no longer needed. It’s perfectly safe to delete everything in the subfolders, although you may find that some items are locked files and will be unable to delete them, this is fine just delete the things that you can to free up quite a large amount of the space.
The second place on your hard drive which requires manual cleaning is in your user profile temporary folder. Depending on how Windows is installed on your PC this folder may be visible or it may be invisible. Navigate to your user directory, if you’re temporary directory is visible then delete everything within it, if it is not visible you will need to turn on visibility through the folder options; you will need to change the folder settings to show hidden and system files.
So there we have it, by using a combination of an intelligent this cleaning utility and a short manual process outlined above you’ll be asked to free up the maximum amount of usable space.
Posted in: Disk Space, PC tips
