Clean up your hard drive  

Over time, your hard drive will get cluttered up with a lot of files and 
folders that just take up space and serve no purpose. We put together a 
list of things you can do to do a little spring cleaning and recover a 
significant amount of hard drive space within a few well-spent minutes, as 
well as some basic maintenance to whip that drive back into shape. 

Empty your Windows Temp directory 

Close all open programs. Then open Windows Explorer and navigate to C:
\Windows\Temp. 
Note: If Windows is installed on another drive, substitute the appropriate 
drive letter for C:. While C:\Windows\Temp is the default location and 
common on most Windows systems, your temp directory could also be located 
in another place, e.g. C:\Temp. 
In this location, Windows, other software, and setup programs store files 
temporarily. Unfortunately, some programs are not very good about cleaning 
up after themselves and leave files and folders behind. To see how much 
space is wasted right now, right-click on the Temp folder on the left and 
select Properties. You might be surprised at how many MB of space are 
wasted. Press Ctrl-A on your keyboard to high-light the entire contents of 
the Temp folder and push the Delete key to get rid of all this junk. 

Empty your Temporary Internet folder 

Your browser stores a certain amount of web pages you have visited in its 
cache. The cache is actually just a folder on your hard drive where it 
saves those files. The most efficient way to clean this out for Internet 
Explorer is booting to a command prompt and deleting the folder. Windows 
will recreate it the next time you restart. Go to Start/Shutdown and select 
Restart. When the computer reboots, either hold down the Ctrl key on your 
keyboard until you see a menu, or watch the screen for the words Starting 
Windows 9x. As soon as you see that sentence, push the F8 function key to 
get to the boot menu. From the menu, select the option Command Prompt Only, 
which will take you to a C: prompt. Type Deltree /y C:Windows\tempor~1 and 
hit Enter (if Windows is installed on another drive, substitute the 
appropriate drive letter for C:). This might take a few minutes if this 
folder is pretty full. Once it's done, reboot. To prevent this folder from 
taking up too much space in the future, open Internet Explorer, go to 
Tools/Internet Options/General/Temporary Internet Files/Settings and reduce 
the amount of disk space to use by moving the slider to the left. This is 
recommended for users who have a fast Internet connection and/or rarely 
ever visit the same page twice. 

Take out the trash 

When you delete files from your drive, they don't actually get deleted 
right away. Instead, Windows puts them into the Recycle Bin to give you the 
option to recover them again in case you deleted something by accident. 
This is a great security feature but the disadvantage is that the files 
remain on your drive and still take up the same disk space. Double-click on 
the Recycle Bin icon to see what is in here. Make sure that everything in 
here is just junk, then close this window, right-click on the Recycle Bin 
icon and select Empty Recycle Bin. 

Remove old unused programs 

If you're a download junkie, then you'll know what I'm talking about when I 
say that you probably have a lot of unused programs wasting disk space. It 
has happened to all of us that we install programs that we only use for a 
while, or dislike and not use, or that doesn't work. Take a moment and go 
through the list of currently installed programs on your PC and remove 
everything that you don't use anymore. Go to Start/Settings/Control 
Panel/Add/Remove Programs, browse the list, and high-light and remove what 
is no longer wanted. Some programs only take up a few MBs, but other can 
take up tens and hundreds of MB. 

Remove unused Windows components 

While this might not result in big savings, it will also help unclutter the 
Start menu a bit. Go to Start/Settings/Control Panel/Add/Remove 
Programs/Windows Setup. High-light each component listed here and click 
Detail. Uncheck anything that you are positive you don't need. A few 
examples: Get rid of the desktop themes. They just clutter up your screen, 
take up resources, slow down your system, and waste 22 MB of disk space. If 
your vision and hearing is fine, you can probably get rid of the 
Accessibility options. If you don't plan to watch TV on your monitor, get 
rid of WebTV for Windows. Browse through the different menus and remove 
what you don't need. If you discover later on that you want a certain 
component after all, just go back to this screen and check the box again to 
reinstall any component. 

Defrag your drive frequently 

Over time, your hard drive will become defragmented, meaning that files are 
scattered all over the drive. Windows comes with a utility to help you 
rearrange files, programs, and unused space on your hard drives so that 
programs run faster and files open more quickly. Go to 
Start/Programs/Accessories/System Tools/Disk Defragmenter. Click the 
Settings button and make sure both boxes to Rearrange program files ... and 
Check the drive for errors are checked and that these options are used 
Every time I defragment my hard drive. Then select the drive you wish to 
defragment. Choose All Hard Drives if you want to do them all at once. 

Tip: It can happen that defragging continuously starts over and over again, 
because of some hard disk activity. If that happens to you, boot into safe 
mode, perform the defrag, and reboot into normal Windows mode. To boot into 
safe mode, reboot the machine, then either hold down the Ctrl key on your 
keyboard during the reboot process until you see a menu, or watch the 
screen for the words Starting Windows 9x. As soon as you see that sentence, 
push the F8 function key to get to the boot menu. From the menu, select the 
option for Safe Mode. 

Depending on how fragmented and how large the drive is, this process can 
take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours so be prepared to leave the 
computer alone for a while until this has finished. 

Scan your drive for errors frequently 

No hard drive is perfect. Every drive has a few bad clusters and will 
develop more over time. In addition, hard drives can have lost file 
fragments, cross-linked files, and other file system errors. To check for 
these types of errors and correct them, go to 
Start/Programs/Accessories/System Tools/ScanDisk. Make sure the box to 
Automatically fix errors is selected. Check the Advanced button for more 
settings. The default settings are usually fine. Then select the drive you 
want to scan, and click Start. 

Convert to FAT32 

If you are running Windows 95b or c, Windows 98 or Windows 2000, then you 
can take advantage of FAT32, a newer and more efficient file system. To 
convert a drive under Windows 95b or c, you need a utility that does the 
job for you since Windows 95b does not come with a conversion utility. This 
is a tiny little program that was made by Microsoft but never publicly 
advertised. 

Download the Windows 95b FAT 32 conversion utility here: 
http://www.pcnineoneone.com/dloads/cvt.exe

Windows 98 even comes with a built-in converter program that will convert a 
hard drive that is currently using FAT16 to FAT32 without losing any data. 
To find out what file system your hard drive uses, open Windows Explorer, 
right-click on the hard drive icon on the left and choose Properties. Under 
the General tab, see what file system is indicated. If it already reads 
FAT32 (or NTFS), then you're fine. But if it reads FAT, then you're still 
using FAT16 and can benefit greatly by converting to FAT32. I've seen up to 
to 30% disk space recovered after converting to FAT32. 

Go to Start/Programs/Accessories/System Tools/Drive Converter to start the 
FAT32 conversion wizard. 
This utility is installed by default, but if it is not listed, go to 
Start/Settings/Control Panel/Add/Remove Programs/Windows Setup/System 
Tools/Details and check the box for Drive Converter FAT32 to install it. 
Once you start this wizard, it will guide you through the process. It is 
very simple and doesn't require much user input, but it could take a while 
depending how big the drive is that you're converting. When this is 
finished, be sure to defrag your drive, because this process will fragment 
the drive significantly. 

To take advantage of FAT32 in Windows 2000, it needs to be set up when 
partitioning the drive, before installing the operating system. 

For more information on FAT32, how it works, and its benefits, check out 
our FAT32 guide. 

Automate your hard drive maintenance 

Of course you don't want to do most of these tasks manually every week. 
Windows 98 comes with a tool that lets you automate some of these tasks and 
perform them at night when your computer is idle, provided you leave it 
running at night of course. Go to Start/Programs/Accessories/System 
Tools/Maintenance Wizard. Choose Custom and click Next. Choose the time 
span in which you want to perform these tasks, usually Nights, and click 
Next. The next screen is for defragmenting your drives. In Windows 98, this 
not only defrags your drives, but also moves frequently used programs to 
the beginning of the drive so that they start up a tad faster. Click the 
Settings button to choose what drives to defrag, usually All Hard Drives. 
Click Reschedule to modify the default time for this task. Then click Next 
to proceed. 

The next screen is for running scan disk. This will check your hard drives 
for errors and either repair them or mark the clusters as bad so that data 
won't be saved to those bad clusters anymore. Again, click the Reschedule 
button to modify the default time for this task and the Settings button to 
customize the options for this task. Make sure the box to Automatically fix 
errors is selected. Check the Advanced button for more settings. The 
default settings are usually fine. Then click Next to proceed. 

The next screen is to remove unnecessary files. Again, click the Reschedule 
button to modify the default time for this task and the Settings button to 
customize the options for this task. Here you can select what clean-ups to 
perform and what files to delete/folders to empty. Then click Next to 
proceed. 

On the last screen, you can verify the schedule for each task. Check the 
box to perform these tasks right away, or just click Finish to complete 
setup of this automated task. That's it. From now on, Windows will perform 
the disk maintenance for you. 


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