How to gain space on your hard drive, the safe way!

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This question was answered on April 9, 2001. Much of the information contained herein may have changed since posting.

Keeping empty space on your hard drive(s) is very important to the ongoing health of your computer.

Windows based computer systems should be careful to leave at least 100MB of free disk space available on the C: drive at all times. The reason for this is that Windows writes “temporary” files to the free disk space and can potentially overwrite or corrupt needed files if it runs out of disk space. In many cases, cleaning up the hard drive can also result in better performance.

Unfortunately, there is not table of contents that will describe all of the various files and folders that are in your computer. Most Windows based systems average 10,000 to 20,000 files, so you wouldn’t want to clean your system up one file at a time anyway.

There are two main utilities built into Windows 98 or higher that make clean up a lot easier.

The first is the Add/Remove utility in the Control Panel. (Start/Settings/Control Panel/Add Remove Programs) This list of installed programs is the closest thing to a directory for cleanup in your computer. Simply select the program that you no longer need and click on the Add/Remove button below. If you are not sure what something is, DO NOT REMOVE IT!

In many cases you will get a question such as “The system indicates that the following shared file is no longer in use…Are you sure you want to remove the shared file?” In general, you can click on Yes to tell it to remove the file, but since Windows is basically guessing as to whether another program needs this file, the safe answer is always NO.

Most of the files in question are very small .dll files that take very little space, so I prefer the safe method of saying No. To get rid of unneeded .dll files, I use the free

<a href="http://www.analogx.com/contents/download/system/dllarch.htm" target="_blank"><font color="#003399">DLL Archive utility from Analogx</font></a>. It will search your system for .dll files that no longer have any references in your system and archives them just in case you needed one. If your system runs for a week or so without any problems, you can simply delete the archives.

The other utility that will help free space on your hard drive is the “Disk Cleanup” utility (Windows 98 or higher – click Start/Programs/Accessories/System Tools/Disk Cleanup). This utility will give you a quick way to get rid of temporary files and empty your Recycle Bin among others. The amount of space that will be cleared is displayed to the right of each entry. If you have more than one hard drive, be sure to run it on all drives, one at a time.

While you are in the Disk Cleanup box, go to the Settings tab at the top right and make sure that Disk Cleanup will automatically launch if your system gets low on space.

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