Clean Up Your Hard Drive

Last week I wrote about cleaning the dust, grime, and cobwebs out of your computer. Now it's time to get your digital life in order by cleaning up your hard drive to better organize things and save space.

Organization should be the first step. If you're a good PC citizen, you're storing all of your files in the My Documents folder (or Documents under Vista). If not, now's a good time to start consolidating data in one place. But take a peek in the folder and you might find things little more than a jumble of random data. Attack the problem by organizing into folders and sub-folders. I organize photos by year and by subject, documents by project, and miscellaneous files by type. Don't be afraid of the "New Folder" command, and use descriptive folder names as much as possible; it makes searching that much easier. While you're organizing, delete temporary files, outdated versions of files you no longer need, and other junk that might be clogging up your drive.

After this you'll be in good shape for more serious cleanup activities, and less likely to delete something you really need.

Next attack specific applications which hog a lot of space. For most people, the biggest will be your email program. Empty out your junk or spam folders first. Next, I typically delete older items from the sent items and deleted items folders, keeping between four and six months worth of both of these, depending on how generous I'm feeling. iTunes is another big space hog. Delete duplicate songs and old podcasts (especially video podcasts). When you're finished, empty the recycle bin.

Your next stop should be Windows Disk Cleanup (under Start > Programs > Accessories > System Tools in both XP and Vista). Disk Cleanup will hunt down files like temporary files, old setup files, and other junk that you don't need. You can then choose exactly what kind of files you want to delete. This can be surprisingly effective: On a Vista system I've been using for a month I deleted 5GB of junk from it. You should also uninstall any programs you don't use any more, using the Add/Remove Programs control panel (this is called "Programs and Features" under Vista). It's a good idea to defragment your drive when this is done (Disk Defragmenter is also under System Tools).

Another useful trick is to throttle down System Restore settings. Go into the Windows System control panel and click the System Restore tab. By default, System Restore is set to use "Max" disk space: 12 percent of your drive. You can safely knock this down to 5 percent with minimal risk. On a 60GB drive, that equals more than 4GB of newly freed space. (Sadly, Microsoft removed this feature from Vista. To limit System Restore's space usage with Vista, you'll have to run a command line program as outlined here.)