My Documents Folder: (Named ‘Documents’ for Vista and Windows 7 users) You would be surprised just how much stuff accumulates in this folder over time. The PC I use for every day to write articles, tips and to store other notes now has over 1.1GB of files located here. Just how much you really need and how much is older less often accessed information obviously will vary from user to user but I’ll bet you could easily archive 50% of these file to a DVD or external USB drive and free up 500GB of space or more, especially if there is more than one person who has an account on your PC. Remember each active account has its own My Documents folder.
My Pictures Folder: Potentially another space waster, even surprised myself as I had 34MB of pictures, mostly .jpg files I has long since forgot about. If you like to save pictures from various web sites that for one reason or another appeal to you it’s time to take a look at what is really of any value and what can be archived or deleted.
My Music: Plug in headphones and listen to music while you are typing away. Nothing wrong with that, just take a look at what your really like to listen to and those that you listened to once and never again.
System Restore Points: You can also free up more disk space by reducing the number of 'System Restore' points: Select Start/Control Panel/System, then in the System Properties window click on the System Restore tab. Next select the drive letter where Windows is installed (usually C:). Then click on the ‘Settings…’ button. Now in the Drive Settings window move the Disk space usage slider to the left to reduce the amount of drive space System Restore points will use.
What is a reasonable % to allocate, a setting of 3% or about 900MB on my 32GB partition will give you at least 2 weeks of restore point unless you are installing a new application in which case that restore point folder size will be larger then the typically 42MB size created daily.
It’s generally assumed that restore points more than a two weeks old are of little or no value. If that space you currently have allocated is set to the default value of 12% (4GB on a 40GB laptop hard drive) reducing the size to about 3% will not only free up about 3GB of drive space but it will also remove a large number of the older restore points that are wasting space.