Gone are the days of low disk space warnings, you say? Not really. Many a time, the primary partition on your hard disk is loaded up to the last few gigabytes – probably because you installed too many programs and games. You can do a clean up, but you can also free up space without the hassles of Shift + Delete. Just try these workarounds to free up some space in the C:\ drive and make your computer run faster.
1. Change Dropbox Location
If your computer has Dropbox installed, you probably chose to keep the Dropbox folder inside ‘My Documents’. You can quickly move it to any other partition to free up space in the C:\ drive. Just right click the Dropbox icon in the system tray, choose Preferences and click Move to move your Dropbox folder’s contents.
2. Relocate Program Files
If you are a download junkie, the program files folder on your disk is probably crammed. Use the Steam Mover utility to move programs installed in C:\Program Files\ to another partition. Specify a particular program’s directory and the target location – Steam Mover will instantly move all your files there and create symlinks in the original location. That is a lot of disk space saved.
3. Move iTunes Backups or Delete Podcasts Automatically
Podcasts that you download using iTunes are in your main partition, right inside your music folder. You can quickly use the Edit > Preferences dialog to move them to another partition. This is quite a confusing process, and there’s a detailed guide here on how you can go about doing it.
You can also set iTunes to automatically delete podcasts that you’ve already listened to. You can do that by going to your Podcasts list and choosing Settings from the bottom, and then altering the choices in the ‘Episodes to keep’ option.
4. Change the default My Documents location
If you have a large number of files saved up in My Documents, you can move the folder to another partition in the disk to free up some disk space. Right click your documents folder, choose Properties, click the Location tab and hit Move to choose a new location for your documents. This is a pretty easy step, and could potentially save you plenty of disk space.
5. Use Symlinks When Desperate
Symlinks are your best bet when you have very little space left in the main partition. When you create symlinks, your folders will be accessible from the original location but their contents will actually be stored in the place the symlink is pointing to. The Link Shell extension for Windows Explorer makes it easy to create symlinks via the right click menu. You pick a link source and then you can go to the destination to drop a hard clone/soft link.
6. Power up CCleaner
If you thought CCleaner cleans all the temporary files in your C:\ drive, think again. Previously mentioned CCleaner Enhancer adds extra definitions to clean junk files left by over 270 applications. Just get the Enhancer installer which downloads the latest .ini file with definitions and you’re done – you can quickly reclaim more disk space in the C:\ drive!
7. Delete System Restore Points
System Restore files could be occupying considerable size in your hard disk partition and it makes sense to delete all these restore points except the latest one. You can use More Options in the Disk Cleanup utility to accomplish this. If you have CCleaner installed, you can use the System Restore cleaner from the Tools tab and remove individual system restore points quite quickly. The Disk Cleanup utility could help you gain more disk space by permanently deleting hibernation and other temporary files.
8. Look at the disk usage graph
The quickest way to find what’s hogging your hard disk is to deploy a disk usage graph. Install any one of these tools, and you can instantly see the amount of space used by the files and folders in your hard disk as neat and pretty graphs. These tools also give you an option to trash these folders immediately. Your only other choice is to use the Symlinks workaround mentioned above, in case you just don’t want to remove them from the partition.
9. If you don’t want to fiddle with any of these methods, just resize the partition using a partition manager like Easeus. That’d do the trick.
Just make sure you have backed up your data before you try anything mentioned here. More tips? Tell them in the comments!
No comments:
Post a Comment