by Dario Borghino

Created on: May 02, 2008

While it is certainly true that complex and better programs tend to use more hard disk space, they are often not the main cause 'per se' of reduced free disk space on your system: the truth is that, rather than the binary files themselves, both programs and the underlying operating system store a big - and often useless or even undesirable - amount of data on your drive that will often add up to the point where the processing speed of your PC will fall dramatically. This article will show you how to clean your hard drive to take all the speed back.

Your web browser, unless set to do otherwise, will log every single page you've visited in a long amount of time, often saving all the pages encountered so to save speed in case you have to reload the page afterwards. The size of the resulting files doesn't usually compensate the amount of speed gained by this tactic, so it's usually a good choice to delete all of the temporary files and folders on your hard disk - check your browser guide for instructions on where to find the appropriate folder. You may want to check for cookies and sensitive Internet data too - apart from saving disk space, by deleting them you'll also improve the privacy on your PC.

When you choose to delete a file, most operating systems don't actually perform an irreversible action to protect the user against mistakes, but instead they just move the files and folders to be deleted to a bin. Make sure you actually empty the bin, because you won't be saving any space by simply throwing things into it.

Many applications have an 'autosave' option, others save temporary files to enable the user to roll back the changes. Unfortunately, some programs just forget to delete all of those temporary files once the program is terminated. All those files can easily add up and have no real use after the program has been closed: delete all of those. Under Windows, you may need to select Preferences -> Show hidden files; under Unix environment, the name of temporary files usually ends with a tilde (~).

Finally, a good practice is to periodically erase the swap file, which may also contain personal data. You might want to do that especially if you are not the only person using that particular machine, especially if you're in an Internet Cafe or similar.

In case you don't know how to achieve one or more of these steps, there are programs that can do this for you. One of the most common freeware software aimed at cleaning up your hard drive under Windows is CleanSweep, which can be downloaded from here: http://www.freedownloadscenter.com/Utilities/File_Cl eanup_Utilities/CleanSweep.html. As a last resort, you can also try the cleanup utility embedded in Windows XP and later, although custom programs like CleanSweep will typically yield better results.

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