In: Categories » Computers and technology » Windows Vista » Windows Vista Maintaining Your Hard Disk
Your hard drive plays an important role in determining the overall speed of your computer. That’s because the hard drive comes into play when you’re opening programs or documents, when you’re saving documents, or when you’re moving and copying files. It also comes into play when you are running low on RAM by moving less used applications to your hard drive from RAM.
Determining disk capacity and free space
Icons for all your disk drives are in your Computer folder. When you open your Computer folder, you’ll see hard drives listed under the Hard Disk Drives group heading. Though, any icon could represent a partition on a single drive. To see the total storage capacity of a drive, the amount of space you’re currently using, and how much free space you have on that drive, right-click the drive’s icon and choose Properties. The Used Space and Free Space are shown both in bytes and gigabytes (GB). The total capacity of the drive (or partition) is shown just above the pie chart that compares used space to free space.
For “exact number” lovers, the GB (gigabytes) number to the right of the bytes number is the number of bytes divided by (roughly) a billion. Though, if you do the math, it’s 1,073,741,824, which is the true number of bytes (230) in a gigabyte.
One gigabyte is roughly enough space to store 500,000 (half a million) typed, double-spaced pages of text. Or put another way, 1 GB equals about 1,000 floppy disks. If the amount of free space on your hard drive ever dips much below 1 GB, you’ll start seeing a notification icon that reads “You are running low on disk space.”
For you “exact number” folks, the “You are running low . . .” notification message kicks in when the free space drops below 800 MB, which is 8/10 of a gigabyte. Recovering wasted hard disk space
At any given time, some of the space on your hard drive is being eaten up by temporary files. As the name implies, temporary files are not like the programs you install or documents you save. Programs and documents are “forever,” in the sense that Windows never deletes them at random. The only time a program is deleted is when you use Programs in Control Panel to remove the program. Likewise, documents aren’t deleted unless you intentionally delete them and also empty the Recycle Bin. The files in your Internet cache, also called your Temporary Internet Files folder, are a good example of temporary files. Every time you visit a Web page, all the text and pictures that make up that page are stored in your Internet cache. When you use the Back or Forward button to revisit a page you’ve viewed recently, your browser just pulls a copy of the page out of the Internet cache. That saves a lot of time when compared to how long it would take to re-download a page each time you clicked the Back or Forward button to revisit a recently viewed page.
Before you click the Disk Cleanup tool, be forewarned that the process could take several minutes, maybe longer. It’s never necessary to use Disk Cleanup to get rid of temporary files.
To recover some wasted disk space, click the Disk Cleanup button on the Properties sheet. You’ll see a prompt asking if you want to clean up only your own temporary files, or temporary files for all users. If you choose the option to clean up for all users, you’ll need to elevate to administrative privileges. You’ll also get some extra options for deeper cleaning, which I’ll discuss in a moment. Next you get to wait while Disk Cleanup analyzes the disk for expendable files. Eventually you’ll get to the Disk Cleanup dialog box. The list of the Files to delete shows categories of temporary files. When you click a category name, the Description below the names explains the types of files in that category. Don’t worry, all the categories represent temporary files that you can definitely live without. There won’t ever be any important programs or documents you saved on your own in the list of temporary files. The number to the right of each category name indicates how much disk space the files in that category are using, and how much space you’ll gain if you delete them. Choose which categories of files you want to delete by selecting (checking) their checkboxes. If you don’t want to delete a category of files, clear the checkmark for that category. The amount of disk space you’ll recover by deleting all the selected categories appears under the list. After you’ve selected the categories of files you want to delete, click OK. The files are deleted and the dialog box closes.
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