Q: How do i to keep my hard drive clean of trash, GIF’s
and unwanted fonts, for example?
A: You can delete things off your hard drive by hand, if
you know exactly what you’re looking for.
Of course, don’t start trashing files if you don’t know exactly what
your doing. It’s very easy to delete
necessary files by accident.
The most common hard drive flotsam is the temporary files in
your Internet cache. Both Netscape and
IE have buttons that delete files from your cache. In IE, you can find the button by clicking on View, then Internet
Options. In Netscape, click on Edit,
then Preferences, then hit the Clear History button. This should be preformed once a month.
Fonts you can remove yourself. Just go to your Start menu and click Settings, then Control
Panel. You’ll see a folder called
Fonts. You can delete any font from
within that folder.
If you want a more sophisticated approach to safely
searching for and deleting duplicate and unused files, we recommended an
uninstall program called CleanSweep form Quarterdeck. It’s also available for a 15-day trial download . It’s the best uninstaller out there.
Q: It’s fairly easy to create more space on your hard
drive. You can buy software to help you
uninstall software, but we like Uninstall Manager which is downloadable
shareware. This will let you search for
old .tmp files you don’t need, and help get rid of things you might not want.
Follow these four easy steps before installing new software.
1)
First, go into Control Panel, and select the Add/Remove
Programs tab. Look for any programs you
don’t use and uninstall them.
2)
Next, go to the START menu, navigate to Programs, move to
Accessories/Systems Tools, and select the Disk Cleanup option. Download Program files, Recycle Bin, and
Temporary files can be checked. You can
select Temporary Internet Files as well, but it will slow your Net access on
pages you have visited until you go there again.
3)
Now go to START menu, select Find/Files or Folders. This will let you search for large
files. Type in *.* for the file name,
and select your C: drive in the “look in” area, (Take into consideration that there may be many files.
4)
When all the files are returned, sort on the Size column
twice, and then scroll to the top. All
of the very large files will be at the top.
Don’t go deleting files too blithely, but anything with a
.jpg, .bmp., .wav, or .tmp is probably OK to delete. Delete these big files.
NOTE: Use your
computer for a while. If everything
seems fine, you can empty the Recycle Bin to permanently get rid of those large
files.