Windows comes with a variety of system tools built into the operating system including the Disk Cleanup utility. The Disk Cleanup utility keeps your computer’s hard disk from becoming cluttered with temporary files as well as programs you no longer use. By regularly cleaning up your hard drive, you’ll also notice a performance boost because Windows uses disk space to enhance memory usage. If your disk is filled to the brim, performance suffers dramatically.

Using the Disk Cleanup utility is simple. First, go to the Start button > Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Disk Cleanup. You can also access the Disk Cleanup utility from My Computer or Windows Explorer. Simply find the hard drive in the display, right-click it, and choose Properties. See the pie chart? That’s a visual representation of your disk’s used and free space. Just below it, you’ll see the Disk Cleanup button.

The utility scans your disk and calculates how much space you will be able to recover.

Depending on how long it has been since you last cleaned up the disk, the amount of disk space could be significant. In this example, up to three full gigabytes of hard disk space could be recovered as shown below:

Notice how some of the boxes have check marks in them while others don’t? You can select which options to cleanup. For example, you will likely want to remove downloaded program files, temporary Internet files, Recycle Bin files, and temporary files. Once you’ve made your selection, click on OK followed by Delete Files when prompted. The utility will clean your disk according to the options you selected.

If you want to free up even more space, you can do so by opening Disk Cleanup once again. This time, click on the More Options tab. This tab gives you options for removing programs and features you no longer want as well as all but the most recent System Restore points and shadow copies.

Clicking the Clean Up button for the Programs and Features cleaning takes you to the Add and Remove Programs (renamed Programs and Features in Windows Vista) function in the Control Panel. Here you can remove programs that you no longer need, thus freeing up disk space.

If your computer is running well, you won’t necessarily need all of the previous System Restore points. Each restore point takes up a fair chunk of disk space, so deleting all but the most recent one can free up a large amount of space.

Plan on running the Disk Cleanup utility every few weeks or so as part of your regular computer maintenance routine. In addition, when your computer starts acting sluggish, this should be one of your first steps in order to recover lost performance.

Microsoft product screen shot(s) reprinted with permission from Microsoft Corporation.

View the whole series of System Tools Articles:

• System Tools: Disk Cleanup
• System Tools: Defragmenter
• System Tools: System Restore
• System Tools: Backup and Restore
• System Tools: System Information
• System Tools: Windows Easy Transfer
• System Tools: Control Panel
• System Tools: Task Scheduler

Celeste Stewart | July 27th, 2008
Tags: clean hard disk, Disk cleanup, system tools
Categories: Windows

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