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 ©2009 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 ©2009 TroubleFixers - All about fixing computer troubles. All Rights Reserved.

Do you feel that the free space on your hard-disk is too little ? Does it seem that something fishy is going on which is eating your hard-disk space? If your answer is yes, read on till end to uncover the secrets of this type of behavior.

Reasons for consumption of free space

Some of the key reasons are:

• Temp files on C drive
• Temporary Internet files
• Backup files created during installation
• Windows system restore data
• Duplicate copies of large files like movies, songs etc.
• Deleting Uninstall files for windows updates.

There are some more reasons as well, but these are most common reasons which can be observed. Now the important question, how to fix it ? Lets read on for the solution.

Fix:

1. Deleting Temp files:

Temp files are the files which are created for some temporary purpose by many softwares. Go to Start > Run type “%temp” (without quotes) and press enter. This will open a Temp folder, at this folder,select and delete all files at this location. After this empty your windows recycle bin.

Note: You may not be able to delete certain files as they might be in use, but delete as many as you can.

2. Deleting Temporary Internet files and backup files:

There are several ways to do it, but we will tell you the most convenient way. Open My computer, right click on the disk drive , go to properties and click on Disk Cleanup as shown below:

This will open a Disk cleanup window as seen below:

Select the temporary Internet files,recycle bin,setup log files, temporary files, office setup files, and any other option which is not very important for you and Click OK. This will start the cleanup process and will delete the un-necessary files thus increasing the disk space.

Note: Above two methods deals with removal of junk and temporary internet files which can also be removed automatically using a software called CCleaner which can be downloaded from here.

What is CCleaner?

CCleaner removes unused and temporary files from your system – allowing it to run faster, more efficiently and giving you more HDD space.

3. Deleting old restoration data:

As a part of system restore utility, windows creates some check-points and saves corresponding data on each disk having restore feature. These files also consume significant space. You can delete all of them except the most recent restore point data if you feel that your computer is running stable for a long time and you may not need very old restore points. To delete it, open disk cleanup window as mentioned in previous step and click on More Options tab as shown below:

Click on System restore clean up button as highlighted in red circle in image above. This will give a warning message, click yes to it. This will delete all old restoration points except the most recent one.

4 .Delete duplicate copies of large files:

Sometimes we have several copies of same documents, songs and even videos which consume lots of space un-necessarily. Finding them manually and deleting them is a real pain. But this work has been made very easy by double-killer. Its an intelligent utility which scans your drives for duplicate copies of files and gives you and option to delete them. You can download it from here for free.

5. Deleting Uninstall files for windows updates:

You can also delete some folders whose name starts with “$NtUninstall.” in the windows directory (for example C:\Windows ) if C drive is the primary partition.

However, They are referring to prior hot fixes, so they should be safe to delete if your system is stable with the fixes applied after windows update, and you have no intention of uninstalling them.

We hope that this article will help you see more free space out of your drives!

This content is just a summary, read the full article at ©2009 TroubleFixers - All about fixing computer troubles. All Rights Reserved.