How to Free Up Space on Your Hard Drive

            Most of us are plagued with Windows operating systems that tend to slow down as the local disk space is eaten away. There are many ways to fix this problem and improve your pc’s speed and capabilities. Some of these steps can take hours depending on the amount of files and how unorganized they are on your computer. Don’t fear the time though, because you will end up saving time you would have spent waiting for your pc to respond and then having to restart! So this process can be a good cleansing. I even recommend everyone repeat this process every month or at least every two months if you own a high traffic computer. You will see much technical improvement instantly! I also recommend investing in a larger jump drive or a portable hard drive

1. So let’s start off by deleting or moving your personal files
2. Whatever you do not need or want, get rid of!
1. Open up your “My Documents” folder in XP or “My Username” folder in Vista
2. Delete anything you don’t need or want
3. Take any older documents, videos folder, pictures folders (what you don’t need often on the HD) and throw them onto a jump drive or portable HD.

1. Keep your music on the hard drive because you will probably need this daily. Also keep any current documents and some photos.

4. Look in any other folders you might find (ex. “downloads”) and delete anything you do not need; send anything else to the jump drive or portable HD
2. Next, let’s look at your programs. Open “add or remove programs” in XP from the control panel or “programs and features” in Vista from control panel
1. After the list loads (which may take a second) sort the list by “size”
2. Scroll to the top and start looking at the biggest programs
3. If you do not know what a program is, leave it alone or google it. If you use the program often, keep it. If the program was a one-time-use, then get rid of it (uninstall)
4. Start with the biggest programs and run down through the entire list. You should at least have gotten rid of a few things!
5. If there are any sketchy names in there that you do not recall installing, carefully google the program (by carefully I mean, if it was a virus you do not want to find it again!). Then uninstall the program.
6. One thing to remember during this process is not to restart the computer after each uninstall as you will often be prompted to.
7. Wait Until the end to restart
3. Now we are going to look in the local drive main folder
1. Open “My Computer” and navigate to your main HD (usually called “local disk (c:)”)
2. You want to delete the unnecessary folders and file you find here.
3. The only folders not to delete are “WINDOWS,” “USERS” (or whatever your username is, “documents and settings,” “boot,” “Program Data,” and “program files.”
4. Delete all others unless you have a specific folder that you put there yourself
5. Now you want to delete any files in there unless they have one of the following suffixes

1. .sys
2. .ini
3. .isn
4. .bat
5. .bak
6. Or if there is no suffix

5. To finish the pc cleansing, run the disk defragmenter which can be found in the system tools folder under accessories
1. This will save you some extra room

Now that you are done with these steps, make sure you deleted any files that you backed up on a separate disk. Delete all that is in your recycle bin and you are good to go. I would finish this all off with a restart, hoping to find a faster boot up as well.