How to Free Up Hard Drive Space

How to Free Up Hard Drive Space

Hard drives come in gigantic sizes these days. Gone were the days when computer users had to make do with 32 MB hard drives and 1.44 floppy disks. Now, hard disk spaces are measured in gigabytes, even terabytes, so most of us have more space in our hard disks than we have use for.

But no matter how huge your hard drive is, it can get filled up rather quickly if you do not use the space allotted efficiently. It would be a waste to keep buying a new hard disk when you can simply free up hard drive space.

Freeing hard drive space is easy enough. Here is how to do it with the Windows operating system.

Delete What You Do Not Need

Open your Windows Explorer and take a hard look at its displayed contents. Do you really need all the personal files you have stored in your hard drive? Should they be in your hard drive? If you are not using these files on a regular basis, you should burn them on a CD or DVD or even on an external hard disk. Or better yet, delete them.

You should also get rid of the Windows components that you are not using – those games and accessories that came with your operating system when you installed it the first time. You can uninstall them from your Control Panel or you can use the free hard disk space function from the System and Maintenance menu, also under the Control Panel.

Uninstall What You Do Not Use

In the course of your computer usage, you would be installing programs and software that you would need to do your work or your studies. You would also be installing games and other software for your leisure. But not all of these programs and software you would continue to use; in such cases, it would be best to remove them outright from your hard drive.

When you uninstall programs and software, open the Programs menu from your Control Panel and remove these applications one by one. Do not make the mistake of deleting them from Windows Explorer because it will make a mess of your system later on.

Clean Your Hard Drive

After you have deleted and uninstalled all the files and applications that you no longer need, it becomes necessary to do some spring cleaning on your hard drive. To do this, you would need to clean up your Recycling Bin and your Windows registry, and then optimize your hard drive.

After deleting all those files, your Recycling Bin may be full to bursting. Open it, and then click the option to delete all its contents permanently. To remove the files and the applications completely from your system, clean the registry and optimize it. You can easily download registry cleaners online; CCCleaner is one of the best freeware for registry cleaning.

Finish it all up by defragmenting your hard drive. After doing all you have done to free up hard drive space, there would have been gaps left in your hard disk where the deleted files used to be. To make your hard drive work more efficiently, you would need to put the scattered bits of data in your hard disk together through defragmentation.

Once all this is done, you would have a lot of free space in your hard drive. No need anymore for you to buy a new hard disk.

This Article is written by John C Arkin.

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