What are the best ways to free up HD space in XP besides of course deleting stuff you don’t need ?
- You really need a new hard drive :-) You're just putting off the inevitable for another day.
- If you're confident in your abilities to stay out of trouble (on a computer, at least) you don't need to allocate 12% of your hard disk to restore points. Three or 4% ought to be sufficient. OTOH, what you really be doing is backing up to DVDs or an external hard drive, inwhich case you could turn off System Restore altogether.
- The Recycle Bin is also allocated a large amount of hard disk space. If you're confident in your abilities to not delete files you really shouldn't have deleted you can reduce the size of the Recycle Bin.
- Another potential space saver would be to reduce the size of your Internet cache, which is also huge by default. I always reduce it to a maximum of 50 Mb. In Internet Explorer, click Tools > Internet Options > General, Temporary Files > Settings.
- Same for Java cache. Start > Control Panel > Java > Temporary Internet Files > Settings.
- You can keep the music/videos/photos - but know that is just wasted space unless you use them often and know - either way - you should have external backups of this stuff (external drive, CD or DVD or something).. Just in case. You could use NTFS compression for such folders - but you will take a penalty for it. You could even look for an inexpensive (relative) replacement notebook HDD and swap it out with one twice the size of the one you have.
- Unless you use it - hibernation can be turned off and the space recovered.
- TMP files, uninstall files for patches, applications you do not use, compacting your Outlook Express databases, etc. That can help a little.
- Uninstall unnecessary applications
- If you are comfortable with the stability of your system, you can delete the uninstall files for the patches that Windows XP has installed..
But really, you need an external hard disk for your music and videos.
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