How to Clean a Hard Drive & Ghost Files
Sometimes, when you uninstall a program, not all files related to that particular piece of software will be deleted from your hard drive. These files are at this point essentially worthless, taking up valuable hard drive space, and could lead to performance issues down the road. These are called "Ghost Files." Luckily your operating system has a built in utility designed to clean your hard drive and delete these ghost files permanently.
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Instructions
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Click on the "Start" menu. Move your mouse over the option that reads "Programs" to expand it into a listing of all the programs installed on your computer. Select "System Tools" from the "Accessories" folder, and finally click on the icon that reads "Disk Cleanup."
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Wait a few seconds while the Disk Cleanup utility analyzes your hard drive and calculates how much hard drive space you'll be able to save by deleting these ghost files.
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Make sure the white boxes next to the all of the folders listed by the utility are checked. This will tell the utility that you want to delete all of the left behind and unnecessary files hiding in these directories.
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Click the "OK" button.
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Wait patiently while the Disk Cleanup utility deletes these files. Depending on the number of files and the speed of your computer this could take anywhere from a few seconds to an hour or more. You can track the utility's progress by viewing the status indicator bar. When the process is complete, the utility will close automatically and your hard drive will be clean and free of ghost files.
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