How do you clean your Hard Drive?

The best route to go is just reformatting the drive. However, if you do this, you'll lose any and all files on your hard drive (start over clean, and you'll need to install all programs again).

You'll need to find files that occupy a lot of "space." Look for things like games, movies, or music (if you have a lot of it). Transfer those files to DVDs or CDs.

If you have nothing that you can lose, try purchasing an external harddrive. Transfer your hard drive over. Then defragment or reformat your primary hard drive.

Have fun!

Wow! I can NOT believe some of the previous answers! Reformat? Reload the OS? Bad ideas, both of them and not necessary. The 9% means 9 out of 100 files are in fragments. Think of a new deck of playing cards, all in order by rank and suit. Now, scatter the deck over the cofee table and pick them up in the original order when new. That is fragmentation, the files getting broken up into pieces scattered all over the disk. The more fragmentation, the longer it takes to read the file from disk. This can get to be an extreme and is called disk thrashing. Free space has nothing to do with fragmentation. First, run scandisk and make sure your drive is in good health. Next, find the folder with your temporary internet files and delete everything in the folder. Do a "find" for all files with a dot BAK or dot TMP extension and delete them all.. Find the folder where all the cookie files are stored and delete them all. Now that you've gotten rid of a lot of stuff you don't really need, try defrag again and let it work. 9% is not excessive for fragmentation, by the way. "Cleaning" and defragging are not the same. Cleaners examine the registry and remove unused keys and things like that, and have nothing to do with fragmentation. Next, you need a good adware/spyware removal tool. I recommend a free one called Spybot, Search and Destroy. The price right, totally free for the asking/download. They also have a few other free tools which you might find useful.

Unfortunately you have to delete some files to free up space. when a hard drive drops below the 10% mark it becomes degraded. External USB hard drives are fairly cheap. You may need to purchase one to backup your files and move them off your hard drive. Ccleaner is a great program but it can only do so much. You can even try to uninstall programs you don't use anymore or don't use often. I am sure you already heard this but when it is full of pictures, music, or video you have to delete. Defragmentation wont work at all until you free up space.

You really have to searchyour com for any software which you are not recently using, Uninstall that and try restarting again. You could also use disk cleanup ( just got to start > all programs> accessories> system tools and delete your temporary files and compress old files. Also delete your internet cache. Keep deleting those which you do not need. Try running a spyware/ malware scan on your com, there are some of these bugs which mask the actual space you have on your com. Good Luck!

You need to reload your operating system to recover space in this situation. Insert the windows cd in the cdrom drive and reboot, then follow the on screen instructions for doing a fresh install of windows. Better yet download Ubuntu Linux and install that, you'll be glad you did.

is this a re-setting up of XP? if so, purely boot from the disk and persist with the educational, and press 'r' to repair while counseled. If it particularly is an older gadget say dwelling house windows ninety 8 or a sparkling reproduction of XP then: enter BIOS and make valuable the CD Rom force is the 1st boot gadget Boot from the CD while delivered on. enable the setup to 'run with the aid of' the records There might desire to be a license contract right here, which you will be able to desire to press F8 to agree and to proceed with the setting up. Now you will attain a setup demonstrate (it is going to test for variations of dwelling house windows already put in between those 2 factors.) interior the setup demonstrate, you have 3 recommendations. deploy dwelling house windows (Re-deploy may well be there counting on the integrity of the setting up, and the version of dwelling house windows) Delete Partition and end If The partition is deleted, then it needs to be re-formatted, pick your record format heavily, if its win98 then FAT32 is a thank you to pass, if its Vista or XP then i propose NTFS. regardless of each and every little thing of this, purely relax and wait, and persist with the educational while presented =] good success

try raxco's Perfectdisk Rx suite

http://www.raxco.com/

>>remove redundant files and other backups (Using Rx)

>>consolidate free space (Aggressive free space consolidation)

>>if it still says 9% available, you must be storing your music and video files or maybe you just have very little space to begin with.

>>you're using ccleaner so temporary Internet files and files in the recycle bin wouldn't be a problem, try tweaking(in Rx suite to be safe) =)

Did you empty the recycle bin after you'd gone through and deleted files? They may still be sitting around taking up space.

Back up as much data as you can to an external drive.

Cleaning and adding more space are two different concepts.

Do not cleat it YOU CAN MESS IT ALL UP