Although hard drive space is cheaper than it has ever been right now it never seems to be enough to hold our ever expanding collections of music, movies, pictures and programs.

Help, I need to Free up Space on my Hard Drive!

We thought that we would take the time to show you a few of the ways that you can free up some extra hard drive space without investing in a bigger driving or deleting you personal files.

1. Using the Disk Cleanup tool

Windows offers a system tool called Disk Cleanup that allows you to delete unnecessary files from your drives on a regular basis. These include temporary files, offline files and older files that aren’t being used.

Here’s how:

Start > Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Disk Cleanup > Select the drive

After the scan is performed, you should see the following window:

Shown in the above window are the types of files you can choose to delete and the amount of free space you gain. Selecting each file gives a suitable description of the what those kinds of files are. So simply select all that you don’t need and click on OK. That should complete the cleanup and free up the specified amount of space.

Under More Options, you have three specific options to choose from, as shown below:

They essentially help you to remove Windows components, installed programs and clear up the space taken by the System Restore feature (not recommended unless required). Note that you also have an option to turn off the System Restore feature completely.

So using the above tool, you can free up space equaling to the amount of unnecessary files and applications you might have on your hard disk.

2. Uninstalling Old/Unused programs from your PC

This option is available in the previous method and can also be used otherwise, using the Add or Remove Programs tool in the Control Panel. It is generally recommended that you remove software that you aren’t using or don’t intend to use in the near future. Removing software programs that you don’t use can free up a lot of space depending on the program and it can also have a noticeable impact on computer performance. Just remember that after uninstalling or installing software you should run a Windows registry scan.

3. Disabling the ‘Hibernation’ mode

If you don’t use the Hibernate feature on your PC and prefer shutting it down instead, disabling the Hibernation mode helps free up a considerable amount of disk space. When hibernation mode is enabled it has to remember the entire state of your computer when going into hibernation which consumes a lot of hard drive space. The setting for this can be found within the Power Setting area of the Windows Control Panel.

4. Manually deleting files that are required to uninstall Windows Updates

This is only applicable for Windows 2000 & XP.

Here’s how:

Set the folder settings to view hidden files

Now go to, My Computer > C: Drive > Windows or Winnt folder and you should see $NTUninstall folders.

Simply delete the $NTUninstall files and folders that are more than a month old and you should notice an increment in your free space.

So there you go, four easy ways of clearing up some space on your hard disk and not having to consider deleting your personal files. We hope you get some use out of them!

The ReviverSoft Team