12 quick and easy tips to free up hard drive space

A cluttered hard drive means slower file searches, defrags, antivirus scans, sluggish Explorer navigation, and more. But it doesn't have to be this way. Just a few minutes trawling your system can free up plenty of hard drive real estate, revitalising your PC and improving its performance. We're not talking about running automated cleanup tools, though they can help too. The Windows Disk Cleanup applet (see Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools) will recover some hard drive space, CCleaner even more, but they're no substitutes for you taking a closer look at your system and applying your own judgement - that will deliver the best results of all. (Please note: manually deleting files can be extremely dangerous. Don't remove anything unless you're sure it's safe to do so, and you have a full system backup just in case you're wrong.) 1. Uninstall Unwanted Applications Launch the Control Panel "Uninstall a program" applet for a list of your installed applications. Are there any you no longer use? It's hard to tell by default, but there are tricks you can apply that might help. Press Alt, then click View > Choose Details, and ensure that "Installed On", "Size" and "Last Used On" are all checked (you don't need to clear anything else). Click OK. Now click the "Installed On" column header to sort by the application's installation date, and take a look at the oldest. Are there any you no longer use? Uninstall them if you're sure they're surplus to requirements. Click the "Size" column header to sort by application size. Are there any particularly bulky apps that you can do without? Remove those, too. Be careful here, though. Sometimes apps install components that you might not recognise, but are essential to their proper functioning. Don't uninstall anything unless you know what it is, and you're sure you can do without it. 2. Track Down Bulky Files Your hard drive may be clogged with forgotten files, but installing the free and speedy search tool Everything can help you locate them. Launch the program, and type a file specification for the largest types of data file that might be on your PC: *.avi, *.mpg, *.zip, and so on. Click the Size column header, and you'll get a sorted list highlighting the largest videos, archives and other files on your list. Look first for duplicates. Do you have a massive zip file in a Downloads folder, and on your desktop, say? If you're sure you need one, then delete the other. Then delete any other surplus files, and try searching again for another file type. Though again, be cautious - search only for documents and data files, nothing that might be a program component or system-critical in any way. 3. Program Files Remnants Browse your Program Files folder and the chances are you'll uncover the remnants of many uninstalled applications. An example: our test PC had been used to test AVG 10. The package had then been uninstalled. We still had a C:\Program Files\AVG\AVG10\Notification folder, though, containing various files intended to help you buy the full version. So we manually deleted the C:\Program Files\AVG folder and recovered a few KB of storage space. Check your hard drive, see what can be removed. Keep in mind this can be seriously dangerous, though. Don't delete things that you don't recognise - only wipe remnants of programs that you know you've uninstalled. 4. Program Data Now take a look in your C:\ProgramData folder, where you'll find the settings and data of installed applications, as well as assorted junk that you can certainly do without. Another example: we'd installed, tested and removed Avast 5. There shouldn't have been a trace remaining. However, we found a C:\ProgramData\Alwil Software\Avast5\log folder containing no less than 819MB of log files. Because we had no other Alwil Software packages installed, we deleted the C:\ProgramData\Alwil Software folder and freed up a big chunk of hard drive space. You'll probably find similar folders on your PC, but again, play safe, don't delete items you don't recognise, or that you might need again (a program might save licence data so you don't have to re-enter it if you reinstall, say). Only remove data you're positive is junk. 5. Archive Your Email Your email can take up a significant chunk of real estate (2GB on our test PC). You might cut this down now by manually deleting old and unwanted emails. But also, take a look to see if your email client has other tools that may help. In Outlook 2010, say, you can turn on AutoArchiving (File > Options > Advanced > AutoArchive Settings), and have the program automatically move old emails to an archive files. 6. Turn Off Hibernation Your PC may be maintaining a hibernation file. If you put your PC into hibernation, this will hold the contents of your RAM, allowing you to restart your PC and carry on exactly where you left off. But if you don't use hibernation this will just be wasting a gigabyte or two of drive space, and can safely be disabled. To turn off hibernation in XP, open the Control Panel Power Options applet, select the Hibernate tab and uncheck Enable Hibernation. In Vista and Windows 7, click Start, type CMD, right-click the cmd.exe link and click Run As Administrator. Type powercfg -h off and press [Enter] to disable hibernation and free up a chunk of drive space. 7. Control Crash Dumps If your PC has a blue-screen crash then Windows will automatically dump some of your RAM to disk, and depending on your settings these dump files can take a lot of drive space. If you'll use this (or know someone who can) that's great. If not, you can tell Windows not to create these files in the first place. Click Start, right-click Computer/ My Computer, select Properties, and select Advanced System Settings. In the Startup and Recovery section, click Settings. And select None in the "Write debugging information" box to turn off crash dumps altogether. 8. Browse Your Public Users Folder Return to Explorer, and take a look at your Users\Public folder. This may contain all kinds of sample videos, music and picture files (our test PC's C:\Users\Public\Videos folder was consuming more than 30MB of files, for instance). Delete any you don't need. But you may also find that other applications have added files of their own. When testing Norton Internet Security 2011, for example, the program asked us if we wanted to save the setup files it had downloaded. We said yes for the betas and finished versions, then forgot about it, and as a result had a C:\Users\Public\Downloads\Norton folder that was taking up 307MB of hard drive space. And our Public Documents folder similarly had a bunch of folders relating to apps that were no longer installed. Again, if you don't recognise something, leave it. But if you see files that you know relate to an application you've uninstalled, then delete them and recover the space. 9. Check Your File System File system corruption can lead to a little disk space being tied up unnecessarily. To look for this, right-click your drive in Explorer, select Properties > Tools > Check Now, and allow Explorer to scan for file system errors and fix them automatically. 10. Find & Erase Duplicate Files If you know what you're doing then a tool like Duplicate Cleaner can be invaluable, helping you to uncover duplicate files on your PC that are wasting hard drive space. Be careful, though. Every PC has some duplicate files, and if you remove the wrong ones - a few DLLs, say - then you could cripple your PC. 11. Analyse Drive Use Disk Space Fan is a clever tool that will analyse your hard drive, then display which folders are consuming the most hard drive space. If you've a library of unnecessary JPGs hiding away somewhere then this will quickly reveal and allow you to delete them. 12. Manage System Restore System Restore is often one of the biggest space hogs, by default consuming 12 to 15 percent of a drive's capacity. It's also an essential safeguard that's saved our lives many times, so we wouldn't recommend turning System Restore off, but if you can't spare that amount then reducing its demands will save valuable drive real estate. In XP this is straightforward: the System Control Panel applet has a System Restore tab with a Settings box that lets you choose how much space you want to allocate. This disappeared in Windows Vista, though. Run REGEDIT instead, go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\SystemRestore\cfg, double-click the DiskPercent key, select Decimal and reduce it just a little: 10%, say. You can use the same Registry key in Windows 7, or click Start, right-click Computer, and select Properties > System Protection to again allocate System Restore's maximum disk space usage via a slider. And when you're finally done, don't forget that for the best benefit you should properly defragment your hard drive, optimising your file layout for the best possible performance. If you don't have a dedicated defragger than the free Auslogics Disk Defrag is a great place to start - it's faster, more powerful than Windows own tool, delivers much better results, and will quickly have your hard drive running at its best possible speeds.

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