Freeing up Hard Drive space?

[Tackalt]

I've been noticing my hard drive availible space shrinking over the past couple of weeks. Probably due to all the games I got for Christmas that I've been installing and playing. But when I uninstall them, it doesn't seem to free up space, so to speak.

Is there anything I should be doing to free up space aside from uninstalling them? Like when I delete a file and empty the recycle bin, is this space coming back to me or...?

[McGuyver]

Not sure what the answer is to this one, but... I would get a second hard drive. I would get a western digital raptor for your c/ drive to run all of your programs. And then get a D/ drive for storage. problem all gone.....

[rhonnin]

Are you using the disc clean up utility occasionally to remove things like the old system restore back ups and what not? I had forgotten to do that for a couple months and it freed up 27 gigs when I did it friday night finally.

[Droxor]

Every hardrive I have ever put in a machine I partician into 5 Drives.

My C Drive I dont put anything on, this drive operates windows and all the little side features like the browser ect.

My D Drive has about 50% of my storage space in it.

For buisness and DvD burning usage I split up the next 3 in different %'s depending on the machine.

I find giving windows it's own Drive speeds things up dramaticly, as apposed to just 1 Drive.

[rhonnin]

I've thought of doing the same thing but with seperate physical drives, one for windows and various apps, one for just games and one for graphic and audio/video files.

[redwarrior666]

http://www.ccleaner.com/

Free progam I use it every week

[roadrunner]

Nice find Red I'm going to check that out.

I download a application a little bit ago that analyzes a disk and tells you where the space is being used. TreeSize
You may be surprised where the space is going.

Also spyware/virus can chew up disk space depending on what they are doing.

In the task manager you can turn on a column in the processes tab called I/O Write Bytes. That will list out how much disk I/O a process is doing.

[Tackalt]

I've noticed there's a lot of bullshit that runs on startup that I don't need as well. Anyone know how to get to that window that allows you to deselect startup processes?

[PSnewbie]

Start>Run> msconfig

Yay, I knew the answer!!

[BigBossMonkey]

Just do what I do... Delete that /windows/ thing.