Many of our readers write to us complaining that the free disk space on their Windows Vista or XP computer is reducing automatically.

One of our readers Ananya says

My hard disk free space reduces automatically almost daily. I have tried restoring memory by deleting backup files, but the next day memory reduces again.

The free disk space reduces automatically on computers in case of most of windows XP and Windows Vista computers. This is quite a common problem and there are two simple reasons behind it.

Lets see the problem and the fix in detail.

Fix:

The two main reasons for reduction in free disk space are:

• Indexing of NTFS Drives for Windows Search
• System Restore Data Accumulated over time

What is drive indexing and how to stop it?

Indexing is a way of storing the important keywords of the files locations and content in a index space. This way, when you search some file or folder, windows will look in the index of the drive first of all and will not look into the real files and folders at that moment. This makes the searching fast. The Indexing data created for the NTFS drive for Windows search consumes noticeable disk space. You can stop the indexing service, this will free up the space consumed by the index but it will make searching a bit slow.

To stop Windows Indexing for a drive, right click on the drive and in general properties of the drive, un-check the options "Index this drive for faster searching" and click OK.

Now we are half done, lets see the rest half, its also very easy, read on.

How to remove old system restore data?

From time to time, especially when you install new softwares etc on your computer, Windows will create System Restore Points, so that your computer can be restored to a previous state in case some problem comes. You should delete very old restore points which you are very unlikely to use. See step number 3 mentioned in this post to delete the same.

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This content is just a summary, read the full article at ©2010 TroubleFixers - All about fixing computer troubles. All Rights Reserved.

I came across a very useful tool called WinDirStat that graphically shows you what files are consuming what amount of disk space on a particular drive. Its a Free tool, easy to use and very effective.

My problem was that I have a desktop which is few years old, running Windows Xp, the primary partition having Windows installed is about 10 GB and after years of usage its almost full. I keep getting Low disk space warnings !

All the data on the disk is useful and I did not what to delete, so I searched for a tool to help me decide what to do?

Lets see how to free your disk space with help of this effective tool.

Fix:

Download and install the WinDirStat tool from the download link given below. After installing simply run the tool to analyze your computer’s disks. It will scan all the files and show you a graphical view like in image below (click to enlarge):

One thing i really like the tool is that it will show you different types of files in different colors. You can visually judge the largest file size of a file just by looking at the size of the colored-block on the interface. This will show you all the files which are consuming your precious disk space.

Simply delete the un-necessary files directly by right-click on the block and deleting it. Its that easy.

Beware : Do not delete system files like Hibernate.sys or paagefile.sys or Autoexec etc, it may harm your windows.

Tip: My Documents folder uses a major amount of disk space if you keep lots of Pictures and Music in it. You can free a lot of space on c: drive by moving these files to some other drive.

[Download WinDirStat]

This content is just a summary, read the full article at ©2010 TroubleFixers - All about fixing computer troubles. All Rights Reserved.