Low Disk Space How to free up hard drive space on your Laptop or PC
How do I free up disk space on my laptop. My hard drive is nearly out of free space. I keep getting a low disk space warning. This article is just the ticket for those of you who love your laptop or anyone who wants to free up space on their hard drive. It’s still not uncommon to find laptop computers that are only a few years old but have a 20 to 40GB hard drive installed, so you will find a number of things to help reclaim some of that lost disk space. Even users with large hard drive can benefit by reducing your AV scan times.
Windows ‘Disk Cleanup’ Utility: A basic tool that should be run periodically to free up space on your C: drive. Description of the Disk Cleanup Tool in Windows XP: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310312 Note: Always start out by choosing the less aggressive options.
Use this tool to remove Internet history info, cookies (see more about cookies below), temp files, auto complete and other junk. There are four options located on CCleaner’s left side of the user interface, the only one you will be using the ‘Cleaner’ option.
Warning: Refrain from using the ‘Registry’ tab as cleaning the Windows registry will not gain you any disk space and could result in creating more problems that it fixes. Remember don’t say I didn’t warn you!
Note that when CCleaner is first installed most if not all the ‘Cleaner’ options are checked, which is far too aggressive. I strongly recommend removing the check mark for all the items listed in the 'Applications' tab and in the 'Windows' tab. Then selectively place a check mark for only those options that are of some value in increasing the amount of free space on your PC.
As an example I only place check marks in the following boxes: Windows Tab: Internet Explorer - Temporary Internet Files, Cookies System - Empty Recycle Bin, Temporary Files, Windows Log Files, Applications Tab: FireFox - Cookies, Download History, Internet Cache. Internet - Sun Java. Multimedia - Adobe Flash Player.
The 'Analyze' button allows you preview (without actually deleting) what will be deleted and how much hard drive space you will get back. Also available is customization, see Options/Custom to add any other/additional files or folders you want removed. After clicking on the ‘Analyze’ button CCleaner listed almost 1GB of files to be deleted.
Cookies: You would be surprised to see how much space is taken up by cookie files. A cookie file is only 1KB in size but each cookie uses one cluster on your hard disk, so if you have a default cluster size of 4KB then one cookie actually uses 4KB (4096 Bytes) on your hard disk. I recently replaced one of my computers and after only 4 months of use, almost 10MB of disk space was gobbled up. Cookies are stored on a user by user account basis so if you have more that one user account on your computer the space consumed by cookies can add up quickly. Cookies are located here: C:\Documents and Settings\UserAccountName\Cookies
Note: If you visit web site that automatically recognizes you, then deleting the files in the cookie folder will require that you once again log on to that web site in order for the site to drop a new cookie on your PC.
How much disk space can you save, between ‘Disk Cleanup’ and ‘CCleaner’ up to 1GB of space or more.