What do you do with the junk in your drive?

Ever noticed how your hard disk free space seems to shrink even if you feel you're "not really" creating or downloading lots of documents? The truth is that your free space really does shrink after some time. And that's usually due to 'junk' that gets created 'naturally', and tends to accumulate as time passes.

Here are some of the most common space eaters.... and a couple of suggestions on what you can do about them:

1) The ever expanding trash can

• Reduce the trash size % if you have huge drives (10% of a 1TB drive is 100 GB of trash ya!!)

2) Web browser cache

• Do a one-time review of the allocated size and then leave it alone

• Many tools offer quick fixes to free up your HD by deleting the cache... which is kinda a con as when you start surfing, the cache will start building up again

• Clearing your cache give a very temporary (and likely pointless) relief!

3) Review and spring-clean your temporary folders (not advisable if you're not keen on getting your hands dirty... or have no idea what you're messing with!!)

• C:\WINDOWS\Temp -- look for fossils that take up lots of space. If you don't see anything big, leave the rest alone. They should clean themselves up. And, you wouldn't want to accidentally delete stuff which you actually need, like cookies.
  

• C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Local Settings\Temp -- ditto above, except there are no internet files nor cookies to worry about here.
  

• Temporary zip paths -- If you access a content within a zip file, and you close the zip file while the content file is still being accessed, that file will remain in the zip temp drive indefinitely, and you'll need to manually delete them.
  

• Search for core-dump files -- especially important if you have buggy apps installed. These dumps are usually found in the application path of the offending application. Hint: files usually end with '.dmp' (I have 2 such nasty little Java-based apps which periodically generate multiple 100MB-sized core-dump files!!!)

4) Accidental copy and pastes

• This can sometimes happen so fast that you don't realise you've just duplicated a whole bunch of files with an extra Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V combo
• Unless you have a tool (see below), manually searching each directory and removing these duplicates are a real pain
• Or if you are feeling lucky, do a search for all files starting with "Copy of...." and delete them!!

5)Forgotten ones and the useless extras

• How do you delete extra files which you don't even know exists?

• You need tools!

Hey, are you trying to sell me something?

• No. Unless you consider introducing to you some of my favourite freeware tools as selling. :)
  

So what are they, come on, tell already!

• Tools dedicated to cleaning crud in your system. The highest rated one is called Easy Cleaner. But this comes with a warning... you'll have to handle duplicate files very carefully as you don't want to accidentally delete wrong files just because they share common names.
  

• Tools Dedicated to scanning and identifying realy duplicate files [link 2 - more SW HERE ] These tools go beyond just the cursory name/size/date comparisons to fish out duplicates -- they go into the CRC for a more thorough comparison to avoid fake duplicates.
  

• Find out which of your folders are taking up most space. TreeSize Free is my absolute favourite freeware for this category. Its fast, simple and the visual presentation really helps.
  

As with most system tools, PLEASE READ CAREFULLY the instructions of each of the tools. You're deleting stuff here, so you don't want to mess up your system while spring cleaning okay? :)

Ridding your drive of crud is a good thing. But that's not all. There are other things you need to do too, to keep the HD spinning away hapily. I'll be covering a few other nifty tools in a future post!

( Due apologies to WLE and other Mac users -- can only blog on stuff I know about or have actually done... and I have not used a Mac since the days of the G4! Soli aah...)