Tips to freeing up drive space on Windows XP

The key to keeping your hard drive clutter free is to know enough about windows to keep it from cluttering up your hard drive to begin with. Here are some helpful tips that you can use in order to cut down on drive space usage. By default XP is not very efficient with managing drive space and there are several major drive space offendors in XP.

 

1. The first one is My Recycle bin. If you right click it and go to properties you will ussually find that it has allocated 10% of your drive to storing files you wanted to delete. Let's do the math, on a 100 Gig drive that is 10 Gigs of space set asside that you cannot use, and it is being used to store stuff you wanted to delete to begin with! Right click recycle bin, select properties and select the tab with each drive letter and use the slider to adjust the percentage of space it reserves for the recycle bin. If you have more then 1 drive you can click Global and adjust it from there to adjust all drives at once.

 

2. Next we will have a look at System Restore. System restore will try to do the same thing, it will side aside a very large percentage of your hard drive to be used as backup points. Now this is absolutely useless unless you actually create restore points and use this feature. To change it's settings right click My Computer and click properties, (alternatively go to control panel and go into System) now from the system properties click the System Restore tab and select your drive and click settings, then use the slider to adjust the percantage to use for System Restore. I tend to never use system restore so i set it to a really low value like 200 MB or turn it off altogether. Just keep in mind that if u do use this feature, setting it to low will limit it's ability to create effective restore points.

 

3. The next thing you can do is go into control panel and go into Internet Options, then click Settings under Temporary Internet Files. Use the slider to adjust how much space will be reserved for your temporary internet files, this space is used to hold temporary images and cookies on your computer in order to help speed things up. But if you have a decent internet connection then often times all it does is waste disk space and is really not necassary, so keep it low around 100 - 200 mb. Click ok to change the settings, now while your here you can press the delete files button under Temporary internet files in order to dump what you already have laying around.

 

These three steps alone can do wonders to free up your drive space, often times utitlities like disc cleanup really don't do much at all when compared to these 3 basic steps. Hope this has been helpful!:smileywink: