How to Clean Up Unwanted Files on Your Hard Drive

Do you have a computer that slowly has been eating up all your hard disk space? Well I did and I found out how to fix it. There are a few different steps that you can take to help clear up some of the clutter hanging around that hard drive of yours. Some of these steps you may even know already.

Step 1
Clean out that good old recycle bin.
Yes believe it or not, you even need to recycle on you computer. When you delete any file from your hard drive it is automatically sent to your recycle bin which is located on your desktop. The reason for the recycle bin is just in case you delete something accidentally you can go in and restore the file back to its original folder. Well if you take a look inside that bin and see that everything is not needed you can delete it, and by delete I mean delete forever so take your time. There is one easy way to take care of this to free up some drive space. Simply right click your recycle bin and choose empty recycle bin. That is much easier than taking out the trash at home isn't it?

Step 2
Clean out your windows temporary folder.
All web browsers store websites that you have visited in the past in a folder called cache. Cache is used to help load pages that you viewed previously load faster. To clean up these files and get more space out of that old hard drive of yours is easy. Click tools on the task bar and then choose Internet Options. While in the Internet Options screen choose the General tab and find where it says Browsing History. Click the delete button and this will delete all your temporary files stored on your hard drive.

Step 3
Get rid of them!
Most of the time there are many programs that you do not need or want anymore stored on your hard drive. These programs can and probably do take up a lot of space. Get rid of them! This is an easy process, simply go to Start/Control Panel and then choose Add/Remove programs. Select Remove, you are trying to free space up right?) Listed next to each program is how frequently you use them to help you decide which ones to keep and which ones to ship off to that old recycle bin. If you wish to delete the program just click remove and it will do the heavy work of deleting all the traces of the program for you.

Step 4
Defrag
Do what? I'll explain it's easy. I am not even going to get all technical on you right now because if you are reading this and don't know what I am talking about you probably don't even care what this means. In short, this rearranges your files click Start/All Programs/Accessories/System Tools/Disk Defragment. Choose Defrag. This arranges all our programs, unused space, and files all in nice neat orderly way that can help speed things up.

Step 5
Clean up your temporary windows directory
Just like your web browser windows keeps files in a temporary folder. Right click the Start Button and choose Explore. Choose c:/ then Windows and lastly select Temp. All these files in the C:/Windows/Temp are not needed and can be tossed into the recycle bin. Just highlight them all and hit delete, then repeat Step 1.

I hope these easy steps can help you free up some space on your hard drives. As manufacturers are increasing hard drive space in their drives the programs are becoming larger. Following these easy steps can help utilize your free space and keep you moving quickly.