How to perform spring cleaning on your Windows XP hard drive to clean up and delete all those unneeded files

There are a lot of ways to clean up your hard drive. This article focuses on using the Windows XP Disk Cleanup utility which is the simplest but least productive clean up method. It assumes your hard drive is virus free and up to date with all of Microsoft's security updates.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

1. Determine how much free space you have on your hard drive.
   It's good to have a baseline so you know how much space you freed up.

2. Reboot your PC. Let your PC reboot to the point where the hard drive light is no longer flashing consistently. This can take several minutes.

3. 
    

   Go to Windows Explorer or right click on the Start Menu on your Windows XP menu bar and click explore.

4. 
    

   Click on My Computer. In the right hand frame, you will see Hard Disk Drives and the name of your hard drive followed by a C:. It will have a Type of Local Disk.

5. 
    

   Right click on the name of your hard drive. Click on Properties.

6. 
    

   Click Disk Cleanup. No cleanup will be done at this point even if it takes a while to run. The program will just analyze what can be cleaned up.

7. 
    

   The default cleanup options are Temporary Internet Files and Downloaded Program files. I recommended you leave these checked so that these files will be deleted.

8. 
    

   I recommend that you check the recycle bin row. This will delete permanently all the files you deleted. If you highlight the recycle bin and click on the view files button that appears, you can see all the files that will be deleted by checking this option.
   I recommend you check Temporary Files, WebClient/Publisher Temporary Files, Temporary Offline Files, and Offline Files. As you highlight these, you can see the description of each item.

9. Once you are done checking all of these items, just click OK and the clean up will begin. When it completes, reboot your PC and check how much space you cleaned up.

Tips & Warnings

• I recommend you perform a cleanup and defrag once every 4 to 6 weeks.
• The biggest thing to clean up is your personal files. You need to go through your files and directories in My Documents, My Pictures, My Music, and My Whatever and delete or archive to CD all the stuff you don't need.
• If you use MS Outlook, you should clean up your MS Microsoft Outlook Personal Folders PST mailbox file.

Resources

• How Much Free Disk Space
• Clean up your MS Outlook PST File
• Defrag your Hard Drive