Running out of storage space? Quick Fix...

Are you running out of space on your hard drive? Computers that are 3 or 4 years old with 20, 30 or 40 GByte hard drives can easily run out of storage space. Especially if you store a lot of pictures or music. While you should certainly consider moving large files, like pictures or music, to another storage medium like CD-Rs or DVD-Rs, there is another procedure that can gain you a little time and speed up your computer at the same time. More on moving files to another medium in a later article.

Windows XP provides a disk cleanup utility that can really help - with little risk of removing anything important.

Click on 'start' then cursor over 'All Programs' then cursor over 'Accessories" then cursor over 'System Tools' and click on 'Disk Cleanup'. Windows will run a check (it may take a minute) and then open a window similar to the one below. You can see in this example that I can save 300,294 Kbytes of space by letting Windows remove the suggested files. To put it another way, that's nearly 300 Megabytes of disk space that I can recover almost instantly! If you are getting low memory warnings, this can provide some immediate relief.