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.

2 Computers - 1 Email account

More and more families have 2 computers. Sometimes these computers share a single email address. The problem arises when someone accesses the email from one computer, and then later when using the other computer the email is gone. If you are using Outlook Express for your email (not AOL) then the solution is easy. You want to leave the original email on your ISP's mailserver and only download a copy to each (or both) computers. To accomplish this you must only change one setting on each computer. So, do this on BOTH (or all, if more than 2) computers (see screenshot below):

1. Open Outlook Express


2. On the top - click on "Tools" then "Accounts"


3. Double click on the name of your email account that you want to share.


4. On the next small window that opens click on the "Advanced" tab.


5. Place a check in the box labeled "Leave a copy of messages on server"


6. You may also want to check the box "Remove from server when deleted from 'Deleted Items' to keep from going over your mailbox size limit.


7. Click OK then Close and you're done!

Now both of your computers will have access to all of the email coming to that address.