Freeing Up Disk Space Is A Great Way To Speed Up Your Computer

Remember how fast your brand new computer was when you bought it? It's current performance is a far cry from what it used to be right? It's a frustrating fact that computers and PCs slow down as you use them. And sometimes they slow to a snails pace severely damaging your productivity and your well-being.

What can you do to speed up your slow computer? There are actually many different actions you can take. Some of them include doing a disk defrag, doing a registry scan, scanning for viruses, scanning for spyware or adware, and freeing up disk space. One of my favorites is the last one I list, freeing up disk space, and it is this which is the focus of this article. Read my other articles or my website to learn about the other action you can take. You can find the link to my site at the base of this article.

In actual fact, freeing up disk space is one of the most effective ways to speed up your computer, especially if your hard drive is nearing full capacity. Your operating system needs free hard drive space to operate properly, and a full hard drive can be a severe performance bottleneck. I'm sure you will have noticed how your computer gradually slowed down as you filled up your hard drive with programs and files. If you take the steps I recomend in this article I am sure you will notice a leap in the performance of your PC.

So what can you do to free up hard drive space? Before I make any of my suggestions I want to make two very important points. The first is that you must back up your files before you go deleting or removing them. It would be a tragedy if you discovered you have deleted something essential for work or from your personal life. The second point is that you should create a system restore point before you start deleting. This will save the settings of your Windows Operating System and enable you to restore it if you delete anything you shouldn't.

Here are my suggestions for freeing up disk space:

- Find and remove duplicate files

This can be done using a duplicate file finder tool.

- Delete temporary files

Temporary files are created by software and are usually not needed after you shut down the software.

- Clear your internet browser's cache

Your browser stores the websites you visit in a cache. You can delete this cache to free up space.

- Change the settings on your browser's cache

You can also change the settings on your cache so that it doesn't store as much data from the websites you visit.

- Delete old multimedia files

Multimedia files are some of the biggest files to be found. This is because they need that space to store all of the images, sound and motion pictures.

- Search for and delete large files

Using the Windows search feature in the Start Menu you can search for large files, then decide whether they can bge deleted or not.

- Transfer files you want to keep to an external hard drive

Purchase an external hard drive to be used as your file archive. Put all of your files on this hard drive so that your operating system has more hard drive space to function.

- Delete or archive your old emails

Emails build up over time and can take up alot of space, especially if they have attachments. You need to delete them or if it is too time consuming a task, just archive them to another drive.

- Uninstall programs and applications you don't use

If you're like me you try out all kinds of freebies downloaded from the internet. Don't forget to remove these when you decide not to use them.

- Disable the hibernation file

The hibernation file is where everything is stored when you put your computer into hibernation. Disabling it will save disk space but it will also mean you cannot hibernate.

- Remove old system restore points

System restore points save crucial windows operating system settings so that you can completely restore your system should something go wrong. These system restore points take up space and so it's ok to delete some of the really old ones.

- Compress files

Compressing files into zip files or rar files will save some space.

- Delete the memory.dmp file

The memory.dmp file is where the contents of your entire memory are placed when your system crashes. As a result it can be a very large file. After you have restarted your computer and it is working properly, it is ok to delete this file.

- Choose to have a small memory dump file

You can change the settings for memory dumps so that less inforamtion is stored on your hard drive when the system crashes.

- Remove unneeded MS Windows components

These include components of Windows such as games etcetera.

- Empty the recycle bin

Do this by right-clicking on the recycle bin on the desktop and selecting empty recycle bin.

As you can see there are a wide range of data files that you can remove from your hard drive. These are the points I go through every time I need to speed up my computer. If your computer hard drive is full it will give you significant improvements. If your hard drive isn't full it will still give your computer's performance a good boost. For further information on how to go about implementing the above bullet points I recommend you review the links found at the base of this email.