by A W Drake

Created on: March 26, 2010   Last Updated: March 28, 2010

Most computers these days come with a hard drive that provides a huge amount of storage space, and this is being improved upon all the time. For the average user the need to save space is no longer considered a priority, but to keep a computer running efficiently saving space and cleaning up your hard drive is simply good practice.

+REMOVING UNNECESSARY FILES+

One of the easiest ways to keep your computer running smoothly and to gain extra disk space is to remove unwanted files, and Windows has a built in feature to do this:

•    Click on the Start button at the lower left of your screen and then click on My Computer.
•    By hovering the cursor over the Local Disk (C:) icon you will be able to see how much space has been used on the hard drive.
•    Whilst your cursor is over this icon, click the right mouse button, then from the menu click Properties.
•    A small window will open with a graphic showing how much free disk space is available.
•    Click on the Disk Cleanup button.
•    Your computer will now begin to calculate how much space can be freed up on the hard drive.
•    Once this process has been completed another window will open with options to choose which types of files you want to remove. Tick the relevant boxes to remove the unwanted files.
•    Click OK and  the unwanted files will be deleted.

The disk cleanup utility window has another tab with other options to recover even more disk space. The most useful of these is possibly the option to remove all but the last restore point on your computer. If you feel confident that you will not need any of the restore points, removing them can regain quite a few gigabytes of hard drive space.

+DEFRAGMENTING THE HARD DRIVE+

Over time Windows will fragment the storage of files on the hard drive so they become stored in random locations. This leads to slower and slower load times for your files. Defragmenting a hard drive rearranges the storage of your files contiguously which speeds up the reading and writing of these files.

•    Click on Start then click on All Programs
•    Go to Accessories> System Tools> Disk Defragmenter.
•    In the window that opens click on the Defragment button and the utility will begin.

Defragmenting the hard drive may take some time but it is worth the wait to

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