Simple ways to increase your computer’s performance – Save hard disk space!
Posted on April 11, 2007 at 8:56 pm
Make sure to read other posts from the Increase Computer Performance series!
- Simple ways to increase your computer’s performace – Configuring the paging file
- Simple ways to increase your computer’s performace – Defragmenting your hard drive
- Simple ways to increase your computer’s performace – Stopping the startup programs!
- Simple ways to increase your computer’s performance – Save hard disk space!
- Simple ways to increase your computer’s performace – Turn off indexing on your local drives
- Simple ways to increase your computer’s performance – Disable Visual Effects in the Performance Options tab
Do you have a computer that doesn’t have a huge hard drive, but you store a lot of pictures, videos, or other large files that’s getting your free space low? Once your computer gets low on hard disk space, normal processes begin to slow down and your computer will run painfully slow. There are of course lots of other reasons why your computer might be running slowly, but this post is specifically for those who know they are running short on disk space.
So instead of having to delete files or move things off to USB sticks or external hard drives, you can first try to free up some space on your computer that may be taken up by useless temporary files or system processes. There are usually three big space “killers” in Windows that are set by default to hog disk space and should be reined in as soon as you can!
1. Recycle Bin – Why pick on the Recycle Bin eh?? The never-irritating and sometimes life-saving trash can just sits there waiting for us to tell it what to do right? Well, it also takes up a LOT of space that it doesn’t need. The recycle bin uses a percentage of your hard drive in order to store deleted files. However, this percentage is set by default at a very high number and ends up wasting a lot of space.
Here’s how to fix space killer #1. First right click on the Recycle Bin on your desktop and click Properties.
On the Global tab, you can choose Use one setting for all drives or Configure drives independently. It’s usually better to configure the recycle bin for each drive independently since it’s based on the size of the drive, so 5% of a 50GB hard drive is much bigger than 5% of a 20GB hard drive. At the top you’ll see tabs for each partition you have on your computer.
By default, the slider bar is usually set at something like 12%, which is very high! Unless you are deleting huge files, there will never be a need for a recycle bin that size. A good size is from anywhere between 3 to 5% of your hard drive. Drag the slider bar and you just saved yourself a good amount of space, especially if you have large hard drives. My computer is set to 1% and I’ve never had a problem recovering a file from the bin!
2. Turn Off System Restore – Another handy little service that can get your computer back up and running sometimes, but again takes up a lot of extra space that is not needed. Also, System Restore only recovers Windows files, not any of your data. So having System Restore enabled on any other drive other than your C drive (where Windows is installed) is completely useless.
To fix this one, right click on My Computer and choose Properties.
Click on the System Restore tab.
As you can see from my computer, I have a C and a D drive of which system restore has been turned off on D. Again, this is because System Restore does not protect your data, it only protects Windows system files, so you don’t need it for any other drive other than the main system drive. If you click on the C drive and choose settings, you’ll get the dialog box to set the amount of space.
For system restore, a value between 2% to 4% will be fine. The default 12% wastes loads and loads of space! I have mine set to 2% and even with that, I still have over 10 restore points to recover from if I needed to.
3. Delete temporary Internet Explorer files – Ahhh…if you like to browse the Internet hardcore like I do, then you MUST clean out your temporary files every once in a while or else it will take up lots of space. And again, as with the Recycle Bin and System Restore, we can set the max size for the amount of storage for temporary Internet files. And again, it’s set really high by default!
Open IE and go to Tools, Internet Options.
On the options dialog, under Browsing History, click on Settings.
Now here you can type in a value for the amount of space to be used!! When I first did mine, it was set to 1GB!!! So I had 1 whole GB of storage being used by temporary files that were never going to be used again anyway! Change that value to something very small like 25MB or even less if you like. After doing this, you should click Delete under the Browsing History section and delete all of the current data there.
4. Actually, there is a 4th thing you can do to get some disk space back! If you’re like most people, you probably use StandBy mode on your computer by simply closing the cover or pressing the power button. No one really uses Hibernate mode because why use that when you can use StandBy, which is easier and a lot faster! I personally have never used it and don’t think I ever will, but it takes up a good amount of space on your computer.
Go to Start, Control Panel and choose Power Options. If you are in Category view, click Switch to Classic View at the top left. Then click on the Hibernate tab in the Power Options dialog:
Make sure it’s unchecked. The hibernate feature takes up the amount of space equal to your RAM, so in my case I was wasting another 1GB of space!!!
Now you hopefully just saved yourself a couple of GB’s worth of space! Now you can last a little bit longer before having to move stuff off. If your computer is still running slow, check out my other articles on how to increase your computer’s performance in the Table of Contents at the top of the post!
[tags]increase computer speed, increase computer performance, save hard disk space, make computer faster, fix slow computer[/tags]
» Filed Under Computer Tips
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Another way I’ve used to save space is to, “Squish” files
(this can be done natively in XP & up, for the older OS’s you need WinZip or some file “compression” utility)
1) find a folder with a ton of my files
go back to the other window and select all the files in it
2) rt click or hit the “context menu” key on the keyboard
3) select “new”
4) “compressed zipped folder”
5) name it to whatever the content will be ie BMP’s.zip, JPG’S.zip or just “ZippedUp.zip”
6) double click it or click and hit enter
7) a new “Explorer” window opens
9) rt click and hold while dragging the files to the other window
10) a little context menu asking if you want to copy or move the files, select move.
this creates a “single” file containing all those files within it thus saving wasted clusters for files that don’t use an exact cluster size ie
4096, 8192, 16384, 32768, 65536, etc.
if your files aren’t these sizes they waste space.
the good thing about the native XP “compressed zipped folders” is that the files in it are availible to open just by opening the folder as you would any folder in explorer and opening the file or draging the file to your application, and for the others like WinZip etc. you need to open it first but hey if it saves space it’s still worth it.
:Edit(add on)
Also, defrag the drive after “creating” and moving the files into the “compressed zipped folder”
Cheers
◄RfD►
Hey I have a question, is it safe to uncheck my Java during start up? will it mess my laptop? I am using Windows Vista btw.
I never knew that decreasing the recycle bin space will be useful.But another tip is also to defrag your disk and perform disk cleanup regularly.Good post.
Hi:
I heard that a way to save on the life of the hard drive is to turn the computer off only once a month or when you have to do updates. Otherwise, use Standby as much as possible. Is this true? Thanks.
thank you so much i needed this site badly u are the best now hopefully nothing will happen and my computer will stay the same right? just asking but no matter what this site was great
Thanks a lot for this info! I’ve always been low on HD space and could never understand why. I would compress files, delete files, uninstall programs and not gain more than a couple hundred MB. I didn’t realise how much space system restore uses. 8000mb? Thats a stupid waste of space for something I never use.
i have 44 videos that i created from my built-in webcam off of my xpsM1530 laptop. my hard drive space is getting very low. the 44 videos has a total of 124 GB. how can i reduce the sizes of those videos so i can have more space on my hard drive which has a capacity of holding 220 GB on my OS (C:) drive? someone please help!
I have a lot of movies as well and I can only suggest that you compress them and get an external hard drive. I got a 360GB external where I keep all my movies and my games, that I play directly form the external drive. That works wonders.
Hope that helps.
First of all, I’d like to thank you for making this!! THANK YOU SO MUCH!!!!
Second, I’d like to know if you know what files are okay to erase off of a Windows XP computer?? Like, what files are unnecessary and are just there taking up space (for example, all the cursors in the cursors folder…are those okay to erase? Will it affect the default cursor??)?
this really helped me free up some space.World of Warcraft takes 10g so I don’t have much space with all of the other junk.I got 13 GB back today deleting old programs and compressing files.
use winzip or any other compression tool to zip the files., or else buy a removable media , like external drives they are cheaper now days., or else buy a new internal hard disk of more space 640gb or 500gb ..,I use external hard disk , they are very reliable and works fantastic., data is safe !!! What else do u need !!!
Hey … awesome info out here … didnt know that disabling the “Hybernate” option would free up so much of disk space … i have a 2 GB RAM … and u can imagine the smile on my face when i disabled Hybernating !!!
Thanx a ton !!!
Thank you very much. I am bookmarking this page and recommending it to anyone who appears interested in having a more efficient computer
Thanks a lot for these tips; my very old computer has only 18.5 GB of space, and by following your advice I’ve managed to carve out an extra 2.7 GB!
Hi, thanks a lot for the Windows performance tips!
You should use a file shredder instead of the recycle bin. The files won’t actually be deleted otherwise. However, be careful, because once deleted, there is a high chance you won’t get them back, unlike with the recycle bin. I suggest going to fileshredder.org/. It a free file shredder tool. I have been using it for a long time now it really helps for when I need to delete files to get space back.