Everest Computers Blog About Computers and Web Design

It would eventually happen to anyone who works with the computer - a message that reads like “there’s not enough space on your disk, please delete all unnecessary files” appears out of nowhere. And that is when you’ve thought there’s enough space there to put much more data than you would ever need.

So what would you do? Well, do as I told, go and search for some files that I can delete? Stop right there! There are more ways to get more free space on the computer without deleting the files that you might need at some point in the future. Below I mention some of them.

The first thing one can do is to clear the Recyce Bin. Files deleted previously and not fully erased from the hard drive are still present there, invisible and archived and ready to be restored. By removing them from the Recycle Bin, you’d be erasing them freeing the space on the hard drive. After the files have been erased, it will not be possible to restore them using normal method of undeletion from the Recycle Bin but it will probably be possible to do with the special programs that restore hard disk information. There’s no guarantee though that the information will be restored fully, so an ordinary user might assume that once deleted from the Recycle Bin, the files will be gone forever. So if you think you might need them at some crazy day and time, burn them to the disk before deletion and put this disk somewhere far away for safekeeping probably in order never to be found and read.

The second thing one can do to free some space on the hard drive is to delete all temporary files. This option and the option 1 (Recycle Bin) can be accessed via Windows Explorer - just go to the local disk root directory (like C: or D:), right click with the mouse, then select “Properties” and then in the opened window access “Disk Cleanup”. The temporary files are there because some installations or applications have needed them at some point in time but no longer need them and for some reasons these files have not been deleted by these installations or applications. It’s quite possible that some errors occurred or the applications have simply been dodgy, but never mind about that now.

The third option to get free space is to uninstall some applications. Ask yourself a question: do you really need everything that is installed on your computer? That is because you might have installed some programs long time ago to test them and have forgotten about them. You could also have installed some games you’ve played through to the end and never removed from the pc. You can also have some files you’ve downloaded, used, and don’t need any more and would never need (just in case you do - you might think to yourself - you could always download them again from the Internet, download new versions of these files that is, which is even better).

The fourth possible way to get more space is to make the hard drives compressed. This is how it works. If the disk is not compressed, the information is stored there normally. If it is, all the information stored there is compressed i.e. zipped up like with WinZip. In order to obtain this information, the computer needs to do an additional work - decompression. This leads to slower access to the files when compared with the uncompressed drives. This is why the compression of the main hard drive where the operation system is installed (usually C:) is not recommended. If there’s only one disk on the computer, and the space is urgently required, one can compress a directory, not the whole disk. But remember not to compress the directory where the operation system is installed (usually C:\WINDOWS). I also would not recommend compressing C:\Program Files and C:\Documents and Settings (or C:\Users in Windows Vista).

In order to compress the whole a disk, in Windows Explorer go to the local disk root directory (like C: or D:), right click with the mouse, then select “Properties”, tick the box against “Compress drive to save place” and click OK.

In order to compress a directory, in Windows Explorer go to this directory, right click on it with the mouse, then select “Properties” and on the General tab click Advanced. There, tick the box against “Compress contents to save place” and click OK.

The last easily available option to get more free space for your files on the computer is to buy another hard drive. The hard drives have become very cheap these days and even for 30 or 40 pounds it is possible to buy a good capacity USB hard drive. Pop down to your nearest electrical retailer, get one and connect it to the computer via USB cable. Windows should automatically recognise it, after which you can use it straight away. There’s no need to do any formatting. I am talking here about external USB hard drives - in my view, they are the easiest option for an ordinary computer user.

In addition to USB external hard drives, also available:

— wireless disk storages  (NAS - network-attached storage server) - they are more expensive as have more hardware inside and need to configured to be a part of a wireless network;

— internal hard drives - they go inside the computer case and are less expensive because don’t have the additional power supply. In order to add them to your pc, you’d need to have some computer hardware knowledge;

— firewire external hard drives - similar to USB hard drives but connected to the computer via firewire port rather than USB.

Please note that in my experience it’s better to buy several average capacity hard drives rather than one big capacity hard drive i.e. two by 250 Gb rather than one by 500 Gb. That is because the big capacity hard drives are more prone to failures than the smaller capacity ones. And also if your hard drive breaks down, it takes all information with it, so you’re always better with several hard drives that possibly share the data (RAIDwire,nas 1 type of storage). Only go for several devices if you need a lot of additional storage and you have enough space to add several hard drives to your pc instead of one.

So this is it. Above I have mention the common ways one can use to get more space on the computer to store more data, pictures, videos, or have more programs installed. But it is up to a particular person how they want to do this.