|
When you don't have enough disk space, the "Add/Remove
Programs" tool in the Control Panel gets rid of the most
junk the fastest. Pick programs there you haven't used in a while,
especially games your kids no longer play, and remove them. This
will get rid of 100’s of megabytes in minutes.
- Delete any file with a name that ends in
.TMP.
- Delete C:\WINDOWS\TEMP\*.*
- Delete C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Local
Settings\TEMP\*.*
- Delete C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application
Data\TEMP\*.*
If you don’t understand what the above 4 lines mean,
don’t mess with them.
Here's another trick.
- Go to Start -> Search.
- Choose “All Files and Folders.”
- Leave the boxes empty. Just click “Search.”
This will find EVERY file and folder on your computer. This
could take a while.
Then with the files listed in front of you, click the word
"Size" at the top of the file size column. This will
sort the files by size and the ones now at the bottom of the
list will be the biggest files on your computer.
Take a look at them. Are there any large .ZIP files that can
be deleted? Any self-extracting archives (.EXE) that can go?
Don't delete the .SWP file, that's the virtual memory swap file.
This technique will get rid of a quick 5 or 10 megabytes. Don't
bother with deleting files less than 2 megabytes or so, it's
not worth your time to go through a hard drive file-by-file in
order to recover 10 or 20 megabytes.
There's a limit to how much space you can recover. That stuff
is on there for a reason. With disk space, it's best to just
get an additional drive. Drive space is dirt cheap. Heck, dirt
is expensive. Hard drive space is cheaper than dirt. Get another
drive.
Notice, "get another drive" is not "replace
the drive." Replacing a hard drive takes a long time because
files have to be transferred.
With laptops, it's cheaper in the long run to just get a newer
laptop with more hard drive space.
0
|
