Routinely use disk clean up.

Disc clean up is simple enough to use. Freeing up hard drive space can significantly improve performance only if your drive is nearly completely full. The reason is that your pc uses a small amount of hard drive space as Random Access Memory. This is called Virtual memory or memory shadowing. If your drive is full then you will experience lockups and overall ¡§slowness¡¨.
Although the amount of hard drive space will not affect your computer performance except in extreme cases I consider hard drive space to be a quality of performance.

The sad thing is that most full hard drives are full of trash you prolly never even seen or knew even existed. ƒ¼

Did you know that when you burn CD copies that it creates a very large file called a disk image for each CD into your temporary file folder? So if you do a lot of CD copying you can fill your hard drive completely up in just a few months? Good news is that you can delete all these files. In fact I deleted 27GB of temporary CD image files on a pc one time. This was huge considering the hard drive had only 60GB capacity.

Now other programs make temporary files as well. Some are well designed and remove them when they no longer need them but others are poor and leave them there. Here is a way to access your temporary files:

1 click Start
2 Click Run
3 Type %temp%

Click ok and the temp directory will appear in windows explorer. All the files inside this folder can be deleted, BUT DO NOT DELETE THE TEMP FOLDER. You may not be able to delete some of the files because they are in use by a program or service. Don¡¦t worry about them.
Now use your disk cleanup application by:

1 Goto My Computer
2 Right Click on your hard drive Prolly C:
3 Click properties.
4 On the tab with the pie chart click disk cleanup.

When disk clean up comes up simply select the files you want to delete. You may see a option to compress old files. It may look like a very attractive option but be warned it could take several minutes to several hours to compress these files.
Another thing that can use up a lot of drive space are system restore points. Now do note windows can use 10% or more of your hard drive space to save these restore points. In XP you can adjust the amount of space used for system restore. You can set that yourself, but don¡¦t worry about it. While the Disk Cleanup window is up click on the More Options tab. In this tab there an option at the bottom to delete all but the most recent restore points. Before you do this understand that you will not be able to restore your computer to a time before the last restore point was made. So only do this if you are 100% confident that your computer is healthy. Once you delete these files you should be able to free a GB¡¦s.

Ok that is all for the Disk Clean up blog.

I do this every so often. I never knew about this, but I didn't realize how much temp stuff is stored. Crazy.
» pyrogrrl12 on 2009-02-15 06:16:49

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