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Thursday 30 August 2007

Where has all my hard-drive space gone?

Just as you can never have enough cupboard space in your home, you can never have enough hard-drive space. Nevertheless, occasionally we all have to sort through our storage and throw out a few things to make some more room. This is often easier said than done when it comes to your PC as it is not always clear what is taking up all the space.

The free version of TreeSize provides a graphical representation of how much hard-drive space your folders are using. Simply right-click on a particularly bloated folder and click on 'Explore' from the menu. This will open up that folder so you can set about deleting any files that are surplus to requirement. Remember to empty the recycle bin when you are finished. I would suggests that you leave the 'Program Files' and 'Windows' folders alone unless you know what you are doing.

If you use Internet Explorer you may want to delete its cache of temporary files. From the 'Tools' menu select 'Internet Options' and click on the 'Delete Files' button. Also, the save files of many computer games can be quite large. You may want to delete a few of these and the best way to do so is within the game. Usually this facility is located on the 'load game' screen.

4 comments:

Borkiman said...

I have added instructions for deleting the contents of the cache in Firefox here

Anonymous said...

Nice info again. Thanks.

Fluena Web Design Serbia - Flash & more said...

Compressing old files may also help :)

Borkiman said...

FWDS: Yes. I have quite a few old flat text files stored in zipped archives. It also never hurts to back up old files to CDs or DVDs too.