Hard Drive Space Hog - Email

Another frequently overlooked area for cleaning up your hard drive, and thereby speeding up your computer, is your email folders. Some versions of Windows XP have a pop up helper to remind you to save space here, but it is often disabled or ignored like so many other annoying pop up windows.

First, it is always best to delete those old emails that you don't really need to save - especially those with attachments as they can take up a lot of room. But, did you know that deleting the email from your inbox does not automatically give you more space on your hard drive? Even deleting it from the 'deleted items' folder will not automatically recover the lost space. That's because the 'empty' space that used to contain that email is still there - taking up space! It's kinda like erasing something from a chalk board - the information is gone, but the chalkboard is still there.

The most effective way to regain space from your email folders is to 'compact' them. Even if you haven't deleted any email, this process can save up to 50% of the space taken up by your email. That can mean freeing up 100, 200 or even 400 Megabytes of storage space. If you delete a bunch of emails with attachments your space saving can be far greater. Try to remember to do this at least monthly to help maintain your PC's optimum performance (see screenshot below):

1. Start Outlook Express


2. Click on 'Local Folders' just to highlight it


3. Now, at the top, click on 'File'


4. Mouse Over 'Folders' then click on 'Compact All Folders'

Your computer will begin the process of compacting all of your mail folders. Note: If you have never done this before, the process may take quite some time. You may want to consider starting it at night at let it finish while you are sleeping.

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.