Hard drives are cheap and spacious, and yet it’s surprisingly easy to consume every last gigabyte. If you’re a collector or creator of music, photos, videos and recorded TV, even a 1TB drive is easy to fill. However, there are three things you can do to reduce the overcrowding on your Windows PC: compress your files and drives, uninstall programs you don’t use or delete files you don’t need.
Of these three, the first is the least desirable. Compressing files slows your system down; it adds a layer of complexity to everyday operations, making it easier for something to go wrong with your data; and it doesn’t gain you any space when applied to pre-compressed files, including most of your space-hogging music, image and video files. If you’re desperate enough to use this method, you can do so on any drive formatted as NTFS.
- Click Start —> Computer.
- Right-click the drive you wish to compress and select Properties from the pop-up menu.
- On the General tab, tick ‘Compress this drive to save space’ and click OK.
Compacting files
Rather than compressing files, you may want to compact certain files. Unlike file compression, compacting doesn’t change your file other than to eliminate wasted space within it. For example, if you use Microsoft Outlook, your .pst mail file can easily grow to several gigabytes in size. That’s partly because when you delete email and attachments, Outlook doesn’t reclaim any of that space. You must compact the file to squeeze out the ‘deleted’ emails. In Outlook 2010:
- Click File —> ‘Account Settings’ —> ‘Data Files’ tab.
- Click your main data file and then click Settings.
- Click ‘Compact Now’.
Database programs, such as Microsoft Access, also have tools for compressing large databases.
Uninstalling programs
A much better option than compressing your drives is to uninstall programs you no longer use. This not only has the benefit of freeing up space, it also makes Windows start and run faster.
This is a particularly useful thing to do if your computer came preloaded with dozens of games, utilities and trialware; you can regain a lot of space by eliminating this chaff. It’s also worth checking what’s installed every six months or so, just to see whether you’re actually using everything you’ve installed yourself. Here’s how to uninstall a program.
- Click Start —> ‘Control Panel’ —> ‘Programs and Features’ (or Start —> ‘Control Panel’ —> ‘Uninstall a Program’ if you’re using Category view).
- Click a program you wish to uninstall, click Uninstall in the menu bar and follow the prompts.
The programs are listed alphabetically by default, although it can be handy to sort the program list by size, so you can see at a glance whether you have some very large unused programs installed. To do that, click the View button, choose Details and then click the Size column header twice to sort by the largest program first. Beware, though: there are bugs in Microsoft’s implementation of this list. Occasionally, a program’s file size is misreported and for quite a few programs there may be no size information available at all.
Windows used to let you see whether you’d used a program recently or not, but this feature is no longer available. Even though you can add a ‘Last used on’ column to the Details view in the installed programs list, the column contains no data. Evidently the feature was highly inaccurate, so Microsoft has junked it.
Sometimes an installed program doesn’t make it to the installed programs list. Once you’ve cleared out unwanted programs from the list, take a look in the Start —> ‘All Programs’ menu to see whether there are some unwanted lurkers. If there’s an Uninstall utility listed in the program’s menu, use that to eliminate it.
You may also want to check through the folders on your drive to see if the uninstallation process has left some files behind. Click Start, type C:\ press Enter and look around your system drive. Look first in the ‘Program Files’ and ‘Program Files (x86)’ folders for any leftover remnants, and then check for any other folders in the C:\ drive. If you’re not sure whether you can safely delete a program’s remnants in this way, don’t. Remember, some programs share common core components with others, so you need to be sure of what you’re doing before you go deleting programs willy nilly.
Deleting unwanted files
Your disk is probably littered with ephemera: temporary files, unneeded backups, cached internet files and files in the Recycle Bin. You can safely delete most of these files. Use Windows Search (Windows key-F) to track down the following files: *.bak, *.tmp, *.old, *.$$$, ~*.* (the * is a wildcard search operator, which searches for all matching filenames). You can delete them all. You can also delete the contents of your temporary folders: C:\temp, C:\tmp and C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Temp (where username is your Windows logon name).
