My laptop has been running slower and slower, plus the boot up time is a major hassle. Since today's agenda was to clean up my office, I thought I'd run some system maintenance on my laptop. However, before this, I wanted to free up a bing chunk of space on my hard drive. The first thing I did was run Disk Clean up under START/PROGRAMS/ACCESSORIES/SYSTEM TOOLS/DISK CLEAN UP. As usual, this freed up a tiny bit of space. So I googled on hard drive clean up tips, which helped a great deal more, giving me a couple more gigs of space. But I still couldn't figure out what was taking up so much space. Sure, this laptop runs Windows Media Center, but I'd delete or archived all by one show.
I checked under START\CONTROL PANEL\ADD REMOVE PROGRAMS and removed all the applications that were no longer needed.
Then I remembered that I had several log on accounts on this machine. Checking them out under C:\documents and settings\[user names], I realized that, obviously, Disk Clean up didn't clean up other logons. So I deleted the temp files, Temporary Internet Files, etc under each log on account. Another couple of gigs of space.
Next I checked out my Windows\Temp directory and was able to delete a ton of files that were no longer needed. That gave me another gig or so.
Satisfied that I had removed everything that I could, I ran DISK DEFRAGMENTER under system tools. I carried on my office organizing as it ran forever it seemed. In the report, I noticed three files that more than one gig in size. They were back up and working files for Google Desktop Search, which I had removed quite a while ago. So those were deleted and that freed up a significant amount of space.
So if you are struggling with hard drive space, remember:
- Windows utilities typically only work for "your" files. If you have admin rights, you can either log in as all the accounts on the machine, or manually remove extra files. This tip is especially helpful if you inherit machines from other users, as is common in a corporate environment.
- Check disk defrag reports for large files.
- Use Windows XP Search to find unneeded files over a certain size. I found some downloaded files that I no longer needed this way.
- Don't forget to empty the recycle bin when you are done.
- You can run a defrag multiple times to get better results.