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Tips on How To Clean Your Vista Drive

Posted: July 20, 2009

Are you using the Vista operating system and finding you have little or no space left on your drive and wondering how do you safely solve this dilemma?

If you are using Windows Vista and wish to free-up hard drive space, then you can follow 4 simple tips that help you perform this task without damaging your system or deleting important files. While some of the clean-up utilities offered by Windows Vista can certainly assist you in this endeavour, they can't seem to quite figure out which files to keep and which should be trashed. You may ultimately risk deleting an important file or document. The four quick tips below will help you ease the frustration of cleaning up your Vista hard drive.

1. Check Your Folders Manually

The best way to go about finding and deleting unnecessary files is to simply search for them. The best place to start is through your most commonly used folders. The default view in Windows Vista does not include a size header for the purpose of sorting files by size. You can right-click the headers and select the size header so you are able to sort the list of files by size. Once this is performed, then you can click the "Size" header to sort your files by size. Use CTRL-click to select multiple files that you wish to delete and press the Delete key. This is perhaps the simplest method, if not the fastest. You must empty the recycle bin to completely remove the files from the hard drive after they are deleted.

sort-by-size.gif

2. Use the Advanced Search Function

Access the "Start" menu then press "CTRL-F" in order to perform an automatic search. Click the down arrow next to Advanced Search on the top right, then select the "is greater than" option next to the Size field. Type a large number in the field. This will only display files bigger than the number you entered. You will be able to delete them right from the search window, assuming you do not need them. Again, remember to clear out your Recycle Bin in order to remove the files completely after they are deleted.

advanced search

3. Find and Remove Temporary Files

Temporary files are stored in the Temp directory which contains the remnants of partially downloaded files, leftovers from installing software, or temporary files accessed by your Web browser. When using Vista, there is a fast way for finding the Temp folder for deleting the contained files. Access the "Start" menu, type "Temp" and press Enter. Typically, you can just select all files at once (CTRL-A) and delete them. However, if you are worried that you may delete a file that you need in the Temp directory such as a cookie file, you can make a back-up by copying them to a USB drive (drag and drop the desired file to an available USB drive) and then delete the original file.

temp files

4. Relocate Your Files

Any other files that you do not wish to keep on your local drive can be moved to a network drive or removable media drive such as a USB flash drive. This is a great way clean up your system without creating the risk of permanently loosing an important document or file.

One Comment

  • Ojjoz says:

    i had very huge problems with i tunes on my win 7 umtalite 64-bit.After 1 day of using i tunes my windows crashed,why?I u now what my problem can be,can u tell me?I have Iphone 3gs and i can't sync any music.This crashing thing happend twice,once I was using Win 7 Ultimate 32 bit,and once I was using Win 7 Ultimate 64 bit.

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