Hard Drive: How to Clean it Up!

Oscar Sodani is a founder of Help2Go and owner of Help2Go Networks, an IT consulting firm in the Washington D.C. area. Oscar holds the CISSP certification as well as industry certifications from Microsoft, Cisco and Novell.

Is your C: drive running out of space? If you have a new, multi-Gigabyte hard drive you may never have to worry about too little space. But those of you with older computers and small hard drives will need to read on: freeing up space on your hard drive is a simple matter. Give us 5 minutes and we'll show you how. For Windows 95/98 users.

The Why

If you are running Windows, and most of you are, be aware that Windows starts to act funny if you have less than 100 megabytes (MB) free on your hard drive. Now, you may be saying to yourself "Ha! Little does he know that Windows ALWAYS acts funny on my computer!" Well, we're not miracle-workers, but clearing up some hard drive space may solve some of those pesky problems.

The Where

The first order of business is determining how much free space your C: drive actually has left.

• Open My Computer
• Right-click on your C: drive and select Properties from the menu.
• Check out the handy little graph. The key term you are looking for is Free Space. If you have less than 500 megabytes free (that's 500,000,000 bytes), you'll need to read on. If you have more than 500 megabytes free, you can skip the rest of this brilliantly-written masterpiece of a tutorial. We'll miss you...

The Who

Still here? Great! Those bozos who stopped reading don't know what they're missing. This is the best part: going through and deleting all the files on your hard drive that have no business being there in the first place.

When programs run on your computer, they often create "placeholder" files on your hard drive. These files are usually small and always harmless, but after a long time they can start to add up to quite a bit of space. These files are called temp files, and there are two main folders where they hide.

C:\TEMP
C:\WINDOWS\TEMP

The How

It is important that you do not delete the folders themselves. You must delete the files that are within the folders. Do NOT be afraid to delete these files -- they are meant to be temporary files and are NOT meant to stay on your computer forever. Think of them as houseguests that have overstayed their welcome. How do you delete them? It's simple:

• Open up My Computer again
• Double-click on the C: drive
• Double-click on the TEMP folder
• Highlight any files and folders that are contained in TEMP and hit the delete key.
• Click yes to confirm the deletion.

Great! We're halfway home. Now, for the C:\WINDOWS\TEMP folder:

• Open up My Computer again
• Double-click on the C: drive
• Double-click on the WINDOWS folder
• Double-click on the TEMP folder (Click on Show Files if you don't see anything at first)
• Highlight any files and folders that are contained in TEMP and hit the delete key.
• Click yes to confirm the deletion.

Congratulations! You have been successful at deleting those temporary files. If you have friends that might have this same problem, click the "Send to a friend" link on the Options side bar.

Have a question? Need help? Get free, friendly person-to-person help with your computer questions or spyware questions in our help forums!