Wow, considering that hard drives don’t cost that much these days, I’m surprised you couldn’t dip into your allowance just a bit. Then again, with gas so expensive, it probably costs more for you to drive to Circuit City than the disk itself costs!

Well, you’re in luck. Just recently a client sent us a zip file of their database that was so large, we needed to purge our disk just to install it. So hear it is, the Official PropellerHeads Clean your Disk Check List:

1. Run a Clean Disk Utility. There are quite a few of these, but Microsoft’s built-in Disk Cleanupis sufficient. To run, just right-click on the hard drive icon, select Properties and then click the Disk Cleanup button.
   You can check everything here except Compress old files. If you see something called Office Setup Files, feel free to check that if you have your Office installation disk handy, otherwise you might want to leave that one unchecked.
2. Reduce the Size of the Recycle Bin. By default, the Recycle Bin will consume up to 10% of your hard disk. On a 500GB disk, that would mean 50GB. That’s larger than my iTunes collection! Go ahead and lower this to a more appropriate setting by right-clicking the Recycle Bin icon and selecting Properties.
3. Reduce the Size of System Restore. Along the same lines as the Recycle Bin, Windows will use a hefty 5% of your hard disk for its System Restore feature. I think that is still bigger than my iTunes collection! This can be lowered by right clicking the My Computer icon and selecting Properties and then finally the System Restore tab.
4. Delete Unnecessary Programs. It happens to the best of us. Especially neurotic PropellerHeads who crave living on the edge. We install some obscure bit of shareware, use it for maybe a week, then forget all about it. Nuke those suckers!
   Go into your Control Panel, select Add or Remove Programs and start removing anything you haven’t used in the past year. If you don’t know what something is, there is usually a link to a web site for more info. But do me a favor and please don’t delete your hardware drivers. That would be bad. When in doubt, let sleeping dogs lie.
5. Delete Large Files. Search My Documents for files on your computer that are larger than perhaps 10MB.  Look at the report generated and see if there are any files that can be deleted. Or perhaps you need the files, but don’t need them super-handy. Consider zipping up or otherwise compressing them.
6. Defragment. This step takes the longest and gets you the least, but don’t worry, just let it run overnight. Defragmenting reorganizes the information on your disk so there are fewer gaps between files. The end result is a little more disk space. To run, right-click on your hard disk icon, go to Properties and then to the Tools tab.

And now some advanced techniques. You should really know what you’re doing before you attempt these. I.e. deleting the wrong file might render your computer inoperable. That kind of advanced.

1. Delete Windows Update Backups. If you look at the contents of your Windows directory, you’ll see a bunch of directories that begin with a dollar sign. The bulk of these are backups that Windows makes when an update is installed from Windows or Microsoft Update. When was the last time you ever undid one of these updates? I thought so. Go ahead and delete those directories older than maybe six months.
2. Delete other Temporary and Backup Files. If you noticed way back in the first item, there was an option to delete temporary files. These were your personal temporary files. Unfortunately, not all programs elect to use that location. Those Bastards! First, start in \Windows\Temp and delete everything older than the last time you booted your computer. Then search your disk for any file ending in the TMP or the BAK extension. You’ll be surprised at what turns up. Again, delete anything older than the last time you booted.

This list should keep you busy until Christmas. Just remember, make a backup before you start!