How To Clean Up Your Hard Drive

Is your computer running slow and is your hard drive space gradually shrinking? Then you should consider cleaning your computer to free disk space and help your computer work faster again.

What is taking up so much space?

There are many files on your computer that are unnecessary and just take up space that could be used for something else. These files can be temporary files, log files and back-up files your system automatically creates. Often these files are just a couple of kilobytes in size, yet when your hard drive is crammed with these files, they take up a lot of space. Once in a while you may also stumble upon a log file that for some strange reason is a couple of gigabytes in size, and just by deleting this one file makes your computer return to normal.

So how to clean up your system?

There are different techniques and tools you can utilise for freeing hard drive space and getting rid of unnecessary files. Below are some of the programs you can use.

Disk Clean-up

You have the opportunity to use the incorporated disk clean-up tool on your PC, which you find under accessories and then system tools. This will scan your system and let you delete files that you do not need on your computer. You also have the opportunity to choose “More Options” to delete earlier stages of system restore files, which in many cases is the cause of the shrinking hard drive space.

CCleaner

CCleaner is a tool from Piriform, which is free and can clear a lot of space on a system. This tool can be downloaded from the Piriform website.

Disk Defragmentation

You can also try to run the Disk Defragmentation on your computer to compress scattered files so that they take up less space on your drive. This tool is also found under Accessories and System Tools on your PC.

Manually deleting

Go through your computer files and see if you have saved pictures, movies, music, etc., which you no longer need. We are never really comfortable deleting personal files, though if you need more hard drive space, you should at least consider moving some of your files to an external drive instead or upgrade your current hard drive inside the machine to a larger one.

Recycle Bin

Do you remember to delete your files in the Recycle Bin? This is something you can easily overlook and if that is your problem, then it is just as easily fixed.

These are just some of the ways you can fix your computer to free some space. If none of these methods work then you may want to download the free program TreeSize Free, which is a program that will analyse your system and tell you what part of your system is taking up a lot of space.