Storage Woes? Time to Clean Up

[BigB]

Well, it's kinda embarassing posting this, but I figured some others might like the tip as well. For the longest time, I hadn't cleaned out my computer of junk. You know, those old programs just sitting there, games you don't play, music you don't want anymore, etc. I saw that my 200GB HD had about 40GB left, and I felt that was pretty strange. So I went on a witch hunt to find out what is up. After going through and adding up the GBs in my head, there was no way that I could have used ~160GB worth of space, especially since I had just backed up the 15GB of photos that were sitting on here last week.

Then it hit me, Temporary Files. These are files that should be cleaned / deleted by programs once they close but that is not always the case. Solution? Simple (Windows XP), though for some reason it didn't occur to me earlier, even though I used to run this once a month.

Start -> Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools -> Disk Cleanup

Choose your drive, select what you want cleaned (Temp Internet Files, Download Program Files, Temporary Files are my usual choices) and boom, you're done. So much more refreshing seeing that 123GB of disk space remaining instead of the 40 or whatever it was. Hope this helps some of you wondering where your GBs have gone.

[Paul Shields]

Good tip. We tend to ignore the fact that OS's (and I find Windows worse than others in this respect) create huge amounts of 'temporary' files. With just this simple task you have recovered around 80GB of disk space! I would also recommend disk defrags (the built-in defragger with Windows will suffice), particularly when a large amount of storage has recently been reclaimed.

[BigB]

Yeah, I couldn't believe it. Like I said, I was completely floored when it showed I had 40GB of space left. Now, it makes more sense, though I wonder which program(s) aren't doing their job of deleting the temp files. It was 82GB of temporary files, with barely anything in the temporary internet files.