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Spring Cleaning Utilities for your PC : Reclaim Hard Disk Space

Spring Clean your ComputerYou just picked up the latest issue of PC World that has a DVD full of trial software, games and shareware stuff. Then you learn about a software that can "predict future" and install it the same day.

Well, there's no harm in installing or trying out new software, the problem is that they occupy tons of space on your computer's hard drive and there are fair chances that you won't ever run these "shareware software".

And not just software, you computer drive is clogged with temp files, duplicate mp3 and images, software installation logs, movie files that are saved at multiple places, etc, etc.

So wear your aprons and get ready to spring clean your PC. All you need are free software and some spare time but the advantage is you will notice speed enhancement and there's more space now to store important stuff.

Step 1: Find and Delete Duplicate MP3 Songs, Photographs, Office Documents and Videos

Believe it or not, we all have tons of duplicate data on our computers - it may be residing in separate folders or other hard drive partitions. Duplicate Cleaner and Duplicate File Finder are small freeware programs that help you delete duplicate files on your PC. They will scan the folders and let you decide which files you want to delete.

[Take great care while deleting files with DLL, INF or OCX extension. If not sure, leave them as such]



Step 2: Clean Browser files, Traces of other programs

Over time, you computer is stuffed with temporary files, logs, invalid document shortcuts, Windows Hotfix installers, prefetch data and so one. While most of these files are small in size, they quickly add up to occupy reasonable amount of space on your PC. CCleaner is an excellent freeware utility that cleans up everything useless from your PC. It can even delete the index.dat files of IE which has secrets about your browing history.

CCleaner also cleans up your Windows registry and temp files created by software like Adobe Photoshop, Windows Media Player, Microsoft Office and other software. Highly recommended.



Step 3: Remove Windows Programs that you never use

Start Add/Remove Program from the Windows Control Panel and remove all the software programs that you haven't touch in the past three months. This could include games, shareware utilities or even licensed software for you have which the installation CDs.

Once you are done performing the above steps, it may be time to defrag your hard disk to further boost the performance. Happy cleaning!

Related: When You Run Out of Space on C: Drive..

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