by Joe Roberts

Created on: May 05, 2008

Windows is quite notorious for accumulating "junk" on your hard drive. You may find that after using your computer for a long time without formatting you just don't have much free space, even after you seemingly uninstall everything. While in the end only a format can restore your computer to its pristine state, there are several simpler and less drastic measures that can be taken in the meantime.

Disk Defragmenter is an important tool in Windows that simply organises data that has been put wherever there was space at the time into an order that the computer can much more effectively find its way around. This can significantly improve your computer's speed if this hasn't been performed in a long time. To run Disk Defragmenter, follow these steps:

Open "My Computer".

Right-click on a hard drive icon.

Select "Properties".

Choose the "Tools" tab.

Click on "Defragment Now..."

This will bring up the Disk Defragmenter program. From here you can select whichever drive you wish to defragment. If you're unsure as to which one should defragmented, simply select one and press "Analyze". It will promptly give the disk a precursory examination and make a recommendation to you as to whether it needs defragging. Regardless of the recommendation, you can always defrag it anyway. It will only help. The longer it has been since it was last defragmented, combined with the size of the hard drive and the amount of data on it will affect how long it will take to perform. It can often be best left to run overnight. It's efficiency will also be determined by the amount of free space. If the hard drive has less than 15% free space available, it will still perform the defragmentation, but less effectively. Try uninstalling old games or deleting pointless media files to free up significant amounts of space.

To uninstall a program you no longer need you can usually either find the program in your Start menu and click on the "Uninstall" button, or you can open "Control Panel" and double-click on "Add/Remove Programs". This will take a small while to gather together what programs you have and then present you with a list that tells you how much space the parent folder of the program takes up and how often that program gets used. To remove it, you just need to click on the "Remove" button and follow the instructions.

When you delete a program it still exists on your computer. To actually free the space, you need to empty it from the Recycle Bin. This can be done by right-clicking on the Recycle Bin

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>