Hard Drive Cleanup

[Cuong Nguyen]

well my 30 gig hd is old and obselete. I find it often that my hard drive gets filled up and I have to transfer some files over to my external hd. to free it up. It's a laptop and I have not gotten around to buying a new one. What program are you using to clean up your hard drive???

[GrimGreg]

I always just cleared space like you said, manually transfering files. If you want more usable space on that 30G, go through and drop the space allocated for temp files and such. It won't free a lot, but every bit helps right?

[fleurys]

you can always try to delete what's in the c:\windows\system32 folder... you don<t need that anyway...

[adamzan]

Yeah clear out the temp files (c:\windows\temp). 30 gig would be ok for the OS and a few programs, and keeping your data on an external drive.

 

There is a program called Ccleaner that you can use but go over the options first just in case.

 

http://www.ccleaner.com/

 

Or you can use windows disk cleanup if you haven't already.

[nige]

i've used this software in the past, it's not much better than what's included with windows, but it will save you a bit more space and give you some more options on what files to keep. HD Cleaner

 

looks similar to what adam is showing you. I would get an external drive and keep your media on that, then you don't have to reinstall windows if you were to replace your laptop HD It's always a good idea to keep about 25% free space on your HD. I notice if you fill it any more, it becomes slow; even after running a disk defragmenter program.

[andreus009]

Hmmm...my personal opinion would be to scrap the 30Gig and go for a 300 Gig drive. Yes, you would have to reinstall windows and software, but pretty much that would be the last time you would do it. Leave the external for back-up in case of main hard drive failure. External HDs are usually slower to access than the HD in the computer.

[Simon]

No reinstalling necessary. Buy a new, larger hard drive. Get an imaging (ghost) program (there's plenty of free ones on the net) and create an image of your current drive. Burn it to DVD, or save it to your external drive. Then install the new, larger hard drive, and image it from the file you created with the imaging program. Your laptop will run exactly as it did before, only, on a much larger hard drive.

 

If you don't have any unnecessary software or malware on your machine, this is the quickest and easist way to get you back up and running in no time.

[andreus009]

Good point Simon...I forgot about ghosting. They do that often here at my office, but I've never personally done it.

[GrimGreg]

I think the whole idea is he doesn't want to buy a new drive, since he plans to get a whole new computer in the near future.

[Cuong Nguyen]

Well I have the hardware to convert any type of hard drive plug into an external hard drive and copy all files to a computer via usb plug. I forgot to keep my 220 male converters to US types. I bought it back when I was over in Iraq to save my computer after a viral crash. I ended up using WinUtilities 2010 and that cleaned up my HD. Cleared up about 4 gigs of crap. I still need to upgrade the hard drive. This laptop I have is reaaaaaaaaaally old but does all the stuff I need.

[edicer2]

The programs i used on peoples computers to clean them up for my bussines is malwarebytes, spybot, adaware free and avg free anti virus. These4 programs can get the computer running almost perfect plus they are all free! They work really well they all find things the others wont and when done you have a very clean computer. Also it hleps when u transfer a bunch of stuff offf your drive to defragment it once in a while also.

 

Do you have vista, windows 7 or xp? they have temp folders in different spots I always go into the users profile and turn the folder options and turn on show hidden folders. Then open up the local settings folder and delete the @!*% out of there and the c:\windows\temp folder

Edited February 8, 2010 by edicer2

[Cuong Nguyen]

yeah, I'm running windows XP. All I run is free stuff on my comp.

[Tungsten]

what i suggest doing is leaving the programs but transferring space consuming things like music, photos, movies, large files, etc

 

if you accumulate everything in my documents just copy the stuff there to somewhere else like another drive and delete it

[adamzan]

If you leave your external connected all the time you can actually change the location of the "my documents" to the external drive.

 

And like simon said, you can image your drive and then put the image on the new hdd.

 

Here is a free http://selfimage.excelcia.org/ I have not used it because I have a full copy of ghost.

 

You may want to just reinstall windows anyway and start fresh. It will be more peppy that way.

Edited February 9, 2010 by adamzan