TOPIC: Cleaning House

Hi Willie,
My computer is running out of hard drive space. I am having trouble downloading and running programs all the time now. What should I do?

Willie Says:
Hard drive space is very important these days. Programs are getting bigger and bigger, hard drive space needed to run these programs is also growing fast. As a rule, you need about 40% free space on your hard drive to run the computer at optimum speed. This often means having to get a bigger hard drive, which can be expensive and a real headache when it comes to saving your files.
Then, there is the computer capability issue. How big of a hard drive will your computer accept? Many of the slightly older machines can only accept limited hard drive sizes. If you have a 140 Gig hard drive and your computer won't accept anything larger, you have reached the limit of that machine's abilities. That, of course, could easily mean having to upgrade or replace your entire CPU. So much for the latest video games, huh?

You could buy an external drive and plug it into your CPU. That would give you lots of additional space to store photos, videos, music and more. Even storing files on a little flash drive can help open space on your machine, to a degree.
Look for a spare USB port to connect to before buying an external hard drive.

Let's try a few clean up methods to improve your computer's speed before we worry about replacing hard drives, OK?

• Empty the Trash
  When was the last time you emptied your "Recycle Bin"? Huge files left here can actually cause your computer to slow down a bit. And, even though you have thrown these files in the "trash", until you remove them from the recycle bin, they are still taking up as much space on your machine as they did before you deleted them. If you thought just sending them to the recycle bin would give you some working room, you were wrong.
• Defrag it
  Use your computer's "Disk Defragmenter" to do some repairs. More often that not, people overlook this built-in Windows feature. The Defrag program will help increase your machine's speed quite a bit. The computer has to find fragmented files all over your hard drive and try to put them back together before some programs will work. Cleaning them up will ease the machine's efforts and speed up the time it needs to locate, open and run these files. This often proves to be a great way to speed up your computer.
• Clean up Temporary Files
  Many times, video games and other software will leave huge tempory files on your machine. Getting rid of them can help speed up the CPU.
  To safely rid your machine of temp files, click on Start, then click on Programs and then Accessories. Then click on System Tools and finally, click on Disk Cleanup.
  
  Play it safe here. You are going to get a popup window with a long list of items. Some of them are already "checked". Those files are safe to remove without any harm to your system. Checking additional files may remove something you may still need to operate programs. We suggest you remove ONLY the files that are already checked.

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Disclaimer:
(lawyers make us do this stuff)
Although we will try to diagnose the problems you may be having with your PC through this column, there is no guarantee that this advice will fix the problems you are experiencing with your machine. Only a true, one-on-one diagnosis is an accurate way to pinpoint the issues a computer may be having. This advice is directed at the most common and easiest "fix" issues that are found in most home or office PC's and can usually be repaired or resolved (with some direction) by the PC user and not a IT professional. 360custom.com, its owners, staff or associates is not responsible for any damage including (but not limited to) loss of data, hardware or software damage) that may result from attemps at following the instructions in this column.