Free Up Your Hard Disk

No matter how big your hard drive is, all those video clips and music files that you share can easily clog your disk. Instead of deleting your media, why not delete some less precious stuff? There are a handful of places where Windows stores (and seems to forget about) its temporary files on your drive; cleaning up this trash can free up some space.

One of these temporary user areas includes a group of folders that contain images of the last Web pages that you went to, as well as uncompressed ZIP files that you have opened. Another folder of stored temporary Web files lets the PC load frequently used images such as logos and icons from the hard drive, rather than from the online sources. Clearing these files out periodically gets rid of those sites that you visited only once, freeing up space for others. You can also allocate a smaller portion of your hard drive for this temporary Web usage, adjusting things to your liking.

Deleting the temporary Web files is an automated procedure within the Internet Explorer browser. When you are viewing a Web page, just click on the Tools drop-down menu, then Internet Options. Then, within Temporary Internet Files, click on Delete Files. You can also delete your cookies here, but be prepared to log on again to all of those Web sites that used to identify you automatically. If you want to adjust the size of this temporary Internet files folder, click on Settings. If you want to view the files before you delete them, click on View Files to see the whole mess. You can be a CSI, digging through the mass of cache files for Web sites opened by other people. Firefox and Opera offer similar levels of automation.

In Windows XP, temporary files are placed in two or more places on your PC's hard drive: C:\Documents and Settings\{your log-on name}\Local Settings\Temp. Windows' temporary system files are stored in:C:\Windows\Temp. Some computer manufacturers and applications create temporary folders in C:\Temp.

You can delete all of the files within these folders, but make sure that you close down as many applications as possible before doing so. As you open applications, temporary working files are placed in this folder, so deleting them when those applications are open will generally produce an error. It's not uncommon to have more than 2MB of files here. Feel free to tag and delete everything in a folder at once by highlighting a single file, then pressing Ctrl-A and then Delete. Once the files fly into the trash can, don't forget to empty the trash.