What's eating up my Hard Drive?

In Reply to: A 38 gig drive ? by einarb2

Hi people,
I teach computing in the University of South Australia, and this is a common problem that many students have problems with.

One of the first things that I suggest is Pagefile, followed by a Registry Crawler Program, and then Registry Healer.
If you go to TuneUp.com (Freeware Download) and run across your system, will solve many problems.

Empty the Recycle Bin.

Internet Explorer is rife with problems and on average is the MAIN problem with Virus/Trojan download and infections. To alleviate this problem "Download FIREFOX 1.0". Then go into programs and uninstall "Internet Explorer".

Restart "Firefox" and download that latest version of Firefox (3.0.5). With Firefox, you have the ability to empty all temp folders/files, passwords, cache etc when you log off.

I try to enforce in people's minds that digital photos, videos and music use up extraordinary amounts of Hard Disk Space. If you are a buff o this type of surfing &/or storage, buy yourself an External Hard Drive. To keep your computer purring along nicely, try to maintain a minnimum of at least one quarter of your hard drive - as free space. Just because it is there, does not mean that you have to fill it up. Each program on your computer has allocated itself a certain portion of your RAM & too, your HDD to run. The more programs you have, the less available RAM and space of your HDD.

Another common problem is that people load Mega/Gigabytes of information onto their Desktops. This means that every time you want to do something the computer has to run through everything on your desktop to start with. If you want to have everything on your desktop, right click on it and "Create A Shortcut" to the program or whatever, then go and file the original in My Documents or Programs.

Another way to free up space is: if you have several users in your startup screen, delete the ones that you donot use on a regular basis, as each user is allocated the same programs that you have access to. If you have four users on your computer, you have effectively taken up 250MB space that could be used for something else.

I trust that this may answer some of the questions of the problems that some people experience
Happy computing in 2009, if anyone wants more solutions, feel free to contact me at "ozziecuttlefish@gmail.com"