Those who are unaccustomed to the slob-like ways of students such as myself often feel uncomfortable at the sight of heaps of junk lying around. These earthly nuisances might be easy to detect and get rid of, but what about their virtual brothers? Your pc is a magnet for virtual junk. Left-away pieces of softwares, previously installed driver files, old chkdsk reports/logs and what not. These things not only make your system run like a hog, but also eats up your HDD space (which you could be using to store an otherwise huge amount of downloaded youtube videos). So what can you do to recover some of your precious HDD space without deleting heaps of data-files or multimedia from your pc? Here are a few alternatives:
Tip-1: Turn off "System Restore"
Unless you feel that using the "System Restore" feature of windows is absolutely necessary to your everyday life, my suggestion is, 'Get rid of it'. System Restore eats up a hefty amount of hard disk space, and lets face it..it has never proved to be as vital anyway. To turn of 'System Restore', go to Control Panel > System > System Restore tab > Check the 'Turn of System Restore on all drives' check box.
Tip-2: Run the 'Disk Cleanup' utility
Unbeknown to the technologically native, Windows XP has a very nifty tool preinstalled in its accessories folder. Its called ' Disk Cleanup Utility ' which become a peeping tom only when your HDD-drives have almost run out of physical space. However, you can manually launch this small application anytime you want and give your system drive a nice, safe, thorough cleanup. To do this, go to Start Menu> Accessories > System Tools > Disk Cleanup. Scroll down and make sure the box next to ' Compressed Old File' is checked. Its apparent from the screencap below that the majority of my physical HDD-space on the system drive was being taken up by unnecessary Compressed Old Files.
Tip-3: Use 'Portable' softwares
Portable softwares are the things of yesterday tomorrow. The software industry was jolted forward a few years when someone came up with the bright idea of solving external dynamic lib-dependencies and creating the first piece of portable code. The result was the slew of portable apps ( like those available here ) we see today. I use portable versions of popular desktop applications like VLC media player, utorrent etc all time. While, these softwares might not solve your disk-space problem in a jiffy, they'll certainly help you get organized and get a hold on your HDD-space. Portable apps rarely invade any external directories or files because they are independent of library packages. That is why, only deleting the folder with the software is enough to get rid of the software for good, you won't have to worry about the app installing junk files on a hidden system directory or anything.
Tip-3: Use a safe desktop cleaner
I ,like many other bloggers out there have been a die hard fan of Ccleaner for a long time. Ccleaner is simply the best out there with its simple architecture, safe sorting performance and frequent updates. So I recommend you to download this amazing piece of software and run it at least 3 times a week to get your pc squeaky clean on the inside :)
Tip-4: Buy a brand new Hard Disk Drive
If all else fails, and you really are running out of alternatives...use your tiffin-money to buy a bigger hard disk :) If you are a few bucks short, then start saving right now.
3 Responses to “PC Power tip: Spring cleaning your system”
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Ragib Hasan on 5/09/2008
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NiH on 5/16/2008
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flevia on 6/05/2008
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