Cleaning your Hard Drive, Local Disk C: [Freeing Disk Space]

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You start out buying a brand new drive, and it seems so large that there aren't enough programs to fill it up! In a year's time, you'll be trying to find ways to save space. It's a constant war to try to keep your hard drive space available, especially when you surf the 'Net regularly. Even if you don't add any software to the system, your hard drive space slowly dwindles away. Why?

In this section, some light will be shed on this issue, as well as give some tips to save space or recover lost space.

• Run SCANDISK regularly, or another better program that does the same thing because SCANDISK certainly isn't the best. Regardless, scan your hard disk for errors often as part of preventive maintenance. This optimizes its operation and recovers lost space being held by lost data.
• Defragment your drive at least once a month. You can use DEFRAG that comes with Windows, or another better third party option. Over time, files can get chopped up and spread all over the drive, causing your drive to have to look all over the place to operate. Defragmenting the drive, thus, increases performance, while recovering lost space.
• Organize your files. This doesn't help performance or space, but it sure helps your mental state. Give directories names that make sense when installing them. Store your data files in a directory all their own. Remember, Windows 95 supports long file names. Take advantage of this so that things make sense.
• Make sure you are using the FAT32 system if you have Windows 95 OSR2 or Windows 98.
• If you want, you can repartition your drive to take better advantage of the space available. With a smaller partition, you can use smaller clusters. Therefore, less space is wasted. This is easiest to do when the drive is new. If you want to repartition the drive with data on it, you will need a secondary program like Partition Magic to do it and keep your data intact.
• Empty the Recycle Bin. When you delete a file under Windows 95, it doesn't really go away. It goes to the Recycle Bin. If you forget about this, you could have several megabytes of space wrapped up in files you thought were gone.
• Disk Compression. It is generally recommended to stay clear of such things, but it is possible to compress your drive and get up to 2 times the amount of space out of it. However, compressing your drive increases the risk of data loss and lessens performance in your system.