Clearing Hard Drive Space on Windows XP

Windows XP was released way back in 2001, so what should you do when you’re running out of hard drive space for these 2009 programs? Clearing hard drive space is a quick and easy experience that can help having your computer run much more efficiently while clearing adequate space to install new programs. How do you go about clearing hard drive space though? This article will list a few different ways that you can clear space on your computer.

1. Uninstall Unused Programs- One of the biggest memory wasters on old computers are old programs that you installed and simply don’t use anymore. So what should you do if these programs are littering your computer? To manually uninstall unused programs: go to your start menu, go to control panel, add and remove programs, and remove any program that you don’t need any more. Alternatively you can remove windows components that you don’t use. To do this go to start, control panel, add or remove programs, add or remove Windows Components, select which components you don’t want, and hit okay.

2. Deleting Temporary Files- Temporary files are created during crashes and during installations; they can be where some of your disappearing hard disk is located. So how do you get rid of your temporary files? Temporary files will be left in \Document And Settings\your Username\Local Settings\Temp folder. All you need to do is simply go to this folder select files and delete them. Try not to delete any file with the current date as they may still be in use.

3. Deleting Temporary Internet Files- While temporary internet files often don’t accumulate to any significant amount of hard drive loss, they do exist, and you should get rid of them. To do this, you need to open your favorite browser, whether that is Mozilla Firefox or Internet explorer. Once there go to tools, settings/internet options, then find the delete temporary files option.

4. Disk Cleanup- One last method you can use to clean up your hard drive is the disk cleanup. To run a disk cleanup go to my computer, right click your C drive, properties and then disk cleanup. Disk cleanup is useful for detecting useless and unused files and will even help you to delete older installations of Windows. This means that if you upgraded to Vista from XP there may still be all your old XP files taking up hard drive space!

There are plenty of options available to you for cleaning up your hard drive, and none of them are very hard to utilize. It’s important to be careful to understand what it is that you’re deleting when you’re cleaning up your hard drive, but with a little research you will be fine.

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