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It depends by what you mean with saving the hard drive. If you want to save hard drive space the first thing you need to do is to clean old files and programs that are there just using valuable hard disk space and you need to remove files that you do not use on a daily basis. Let's start with the old programs. Download and install a free tool called CCleaner. This tool will remove all your files that the operating system created which should be only temporary files but now they remain there forever and then you can use the same program to clean a lot of other bad things you have in the disk. Google Earth leaves a lot of traces that can easily reach 500 MB, the same goes for MSN Messenger and many other things like that. The same program can also be used to remove all the programs you do not want easily and super fast unlike windows vista default tool that is too much slow...

The next thing you should do is to remove files you do not use on a daily basis. Those files are there just using space and by zipping and sending them to a portable device such as a Pen Drive you can save several GB on your hard disk. You get both more space and speed as well.

The next thing you can mean with save the hard drive of the old computer is to give a new use to it. I personally like to use the old drive as a backup place, just a last backup place because since it's old the risk of data failure is too big to be safe to keep critical files under such disk roof. You know that the average hard disk never lasts more than 5 years. I bought one in 2006 that lasted me 2 months... and it was just a secondary hard disk to keep my things there!

Another thing you can use it for is to have it as a firewall. You can install all the security software there and then you can have that computer filtering all the internet connections that enter in your house. The faster the computer is the better but you do not need to have a Pentium IV doing such thing, even a 386 can do it with command line software.

Finally you can save the old disk by using it as a server. Imagine a company that needs to have the same program served to many clients. This hard disk can do the task perfectly. They have not improved that much in speed over the years, they only doubled their capacity over the years. So this makes this job perfect for it!

See, who said that an old disk had to go directly to the recicler? You can use it again!

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