My hard drive is full! How do I free up space?

What is hogging up my hard drive space? Is a question you may be asking yourself right now. 
My laptop is a little old with only 40 GB of hard drive space, but that may seem gargantuan if you have even an older computer with under 1 GB of space. I found myself saying "how do I find out what is hogging up space without digging through every directory on my hard drive." You can of course un-install programs that are not needed by clicking on Start at the bottom left of your screen, and then clicking on the control panel. In XP click on add and remove programs. A list of programs installed on the computer will be generated, scroll down and select a program that needs to be removed and click on the remove button and Windows will remove it from your computer. But after that what do you do?

I think the first thing to do is to use the built in disk cleanup utility. Click on the Start button, then put the arrow over all programs, then move the arrow over accessories, then to System tools, click on disk cleanup on the list of files. Disk cleanup will then scan the C: drive to determine what it can do to help. The list will show how much space is being used by each item on the list. Put a green check next to the items you would like to clean up. I'm using XP so these steps may be different in your version of Windows. Don't hit OK yet. Click on the More Options tab located on the top of the screen next to the Disk cleanup tab. Find System Restore and click on the Clean up tab next to it and click OK. You should do this because in Windows Me and XP old settings can be reverted back to if a change in your system causes some sort of issue. You may have many restore points if lot of programs have been installed and un-installed on your system, and they can take up a lot of space. I would recommend deleting all but the most recent one. After the program is done cleaning up old restore points click on the Disk cleanup tab and then click OK. Cleanup will finish cleaning up and close. If we had click OK after we selected our green check marks then cleanup would have closed down and we would have had to reopen it to cleanup the old settings.

The next step is to use the free program FilePro. FilePro will display how the hard drive space is being used and what files are taking up the most space. It can show the same information in different ways. It can show statistics in a file format or by directory. My favorite is the TreeMap. TreeMap shows a graphical snapshot of the entire drive. There is a zoom scroll tool or you can use the mouse to get a closer look at a particular file or scroll around to see the big picture. When I was using this feature I found several disk image files that were taking up a very large amount of space. I no longer needed the files and freed up about 3 GB worth of hard drive space. FilePro is also part of the LiberKey suite and can be added to your collection collection via the LiberKey site.

Now you should have lots of extra space to fill up with pictures of fluffy and movies of Juniors first birthday party!

Dan