How to Free Hard Drive Space Fast
With each passing year, hard drive capacities keep increasing and people do not practice scrimping on storage like they did before. Though, it’s still a good idea to give your drive a quick sweep from time to time to reduce clutter and avoid filling it up prematurely which makes the computer process slower over time. Here are a few fast steps to help you eliminate junk and reclaim your lost space:
Empty Your Recycling Bin
This is the first step in cleaning out junk from your hardware. Just right-click on the Recycle Bin and choose ‘Empty Recycle Bin’ to clear out all those deleted folders and files, images, sound clips and so on.
Use a Disk Cleanup tool
Windows has its own Disk Cleanup tool which you can find by clicking on Start> All Programs> Accessories> System Tools> Disk Cleanup. Select the drive that you want to clean, usually the C Drive and let the tool clean your disk. After the cleaning, the tool should tell you how much space you can free up by deleting different kinds of files, including cached Web pages, temporary application files, reports from Windows Error Reporting, and so on. You can check and uncheck items that you do not want to be cleared. If you want more space to be cleared, that you have to clean even more.
Disk Cleanup doesn’t cover all of your PC’s caches, either–especially if you’re using a browser other than Internet Explorer. There are other browsers that can help you clear unwanted cookies:
Firefox: Use Tools> Advanced> Network. Click the Clear Now button to clear the cache, and adjust the amount of space that the cache uses down to what you can spare.
Safari: Enable the menu bar by clicking the gear in the upper-right corner and choose Show Menu Bar. Now choose Edit, Empty Cache.
Google Chrome: Look for the wrench icon in the upper-right corner and click on it. Then go to Options, Personal Stuff, Clear Browsing Data. Here you can check what kinds of data to delete; check ‘Empty the Cache’ and select ‘Everything’ from the displayed drop-down menu.
Manage Your Media
No matter how many disks you have or how much you try to clean your PC, there’s still not enough space in your computer if you do not delete anything significant. Though that you can maximize capacity by managing your media:
Keep Archives: Keep archives of your movies, music and pictures. Instead of storing them in your computer or in CDs, utilize other storage means such as Google’s Picasa Web Album. Also, you can use this app called Fotobounce that enables you to upload and download albums with ease. The same goes for music and video files. If you already have them in Youtube or posted on Facebook, delete these files and use Fotobounce to re-download them again.
If you are a fan of series, you can either save these files into CDs and label them so you do not have to get rid of your precious collection. If you have too many CDs, it really won’t hurt to get rid of old episodes of the Bold and the Beautiful or Ally MacBeal.