Follow these steps – a checklist for getting there:
- Reduce the space reserved for System Restore. – It can take up anywhere from 200 MB to several GB. Yet for the last 1-2 restore points, < 200 MB of space is plenty.
- Delete files immediately instead of sending them to the Recycle Bin – This can be useful for some people, but be careful with it. I simply removed the Recycle Bin from my desktop so it would stop annoying me by telling me it was full.
- Scan your hard drive(s) for unnecessary files – Use programs such as TuneUp or CCleaner.
- Compress files manually – Although this word gets mentioned more and more often, the number of people who actually do it is not growing.
- Turn on file system compression – One of the most effective methods is to turn on compression. Windows uses Zip compression. But don’t worry that you will end up with nothing but zip files; they stay exactly as they are. In Explorer you can simply choose to have their names shown in blue.
- Uninstall Vista – If you have Windows Vista, all the previous steps may come to nothing. And I honestly mean it. To use Vista efficiently, you should have at least 1.5 GB of fast memory.
- Split your disk into OS and data – Set a reasonable size limit for the disk – if it starts running out of space, it is clear that something is wrong, for example you have a virus creating “empty” files, a stuffed temp folder, and so on. You can go even further and split the disk by type of data according to size. That way you will immediately see where all the junk is piling up.
- Don’t keep important music in FLAC and similar formats – Lossless formats may be great for audiophiles, but they can take up precious MB on your disk. Burn the music you don’t listen to onto a CD (or even 2 as a backup, it still comes out much cheaper than any hard drive) and keep a record of it.