Top 5 List For Cleaning Up Your Hard Drive
Gnomie techmarshal from our chat room writes:
Hey Chris,
I’m not new to your live feed, but I am new to the chat room. My handle is techmarshal and I thought I would send you this top five list. So here it goes…
- Get rid of the programs that you never use or have just forgotten about. These programs not only take up hard drive space but also can slow down your system with unecessary processes.
- Look at your music and picture library and see if you have any duplicates that are not needed. If you have a lot of files, then you can download programs that scan for duplicate files. The program that I use is Easy Duplicate Finder from majorgeeks.com. It’s safe and very effective.
- Get a high capacity flash drive and copy needed but not very often used files over to it. This will help clear your hard drive and you will still have those important files easily accessible at any time.
- Convert files into a smaller format. For instance, if you have a lot of videos in mp4 format, you can convert them to a much smaller flv format. The program I use is MediaCoder. It’s free and converts many different formats.
- Use a file finder to search for the largest files on your hard drive. There are many different programs to do this — like Large File Finder. Simply choose the unneeded files and delete them. It’s that simple.
Tags: clean computer, computer maintenance, hard drive, media storage
For large file clean up, I use the Java based JDiskReport. Its free and will scour your disk or a subset of folders. It provides a list of all files and graphs the listing as a pie chart with a folder list on the left. You can open the locations in explorer via a right click menu. Quite nice.
http://www.jgoodies.com/freeware/jdiskreport/
P.S. Not involved with the group that creates JDiskReport, just a satisified user. :)