17 Ways to Give Your Harddisk More Space

There are many things you can do to make your PC loads quicker and run faster. One of them is to give more free space to your hard disk. For this purpose, what we are used to do is only deleting unnecessary files and compress rarely opened ones. There are yet other alternatives that you may simply forget or just do not aware of.

The methods which are about to be covered are purposely for Windows user, but some can be applied to other operating system as well. All the free softwares I include here are Windows compatible.

1. Find and eliminate duplicate files - if you work with a lot of data everyday, there is a big chance you have duplicate files in your PC. Try to use Easy Duplicate Finder to solve this situation.

2. Use registry cleaner - all unused keys in your registry make system does everything slower and may cause errors. Download and install Wise Registry Cleaner to get registry as clean as possible.

3. Use online storage - you can use Gmail Drive for easy data transfer into your Gmail account from Windows explorer, or search other online storage services. There are lots of them available for free.

4. Use file cleaner application to get rid of any temporary files. CCleaner is a popular choice for this task.

5. Manage your installed softwares - uninstall any rarely used and install only applications with features that satisfy your daily need. You don't have to use a sophisticated word processor if your everyday need is only create simple document with a few format and layout styles. Look closer at the size of disk space consumed by each application as well.

6. Do you backup often? Then make your backup files compressed. If you want to do it automatically, use FileHamster. This freeware is able to create backup in compressed format. Compress other files that have rarely been opened as well. If possible, try to figure out which compression type (ZIP, RAR, 7-Zip, or others) is best for each targetted file format.

7. Save to external storage media (CD, DVD, external hard disk, and the like).

8. Delete files which no longer needed.

9. Compress or delete all manual pages or help documentations that you think there is no use anymore to keep. Also remove other unnecessary files in every applications such as Readme files or internet shortcuts to the developer's sites.

10. Convert any multimedia and graphic files to more compressed formats. For example, from DV AVI into DivX or XviD.

11. Remove your standard wallpapers (if you already get really bored of them). Navigate to Windows, open Web folder, then Wallpaper. There you can find wallpapers listed in Display properties.

12. Reduce the amount of disk space used by System Restore for each drive.

13. Reduce the storage capacity of recycle bin or remove files immediately without moving into it.

14. Use NTFS instead of FAT file system.

15. Remove any unnecessary plug-ins within your installed softwares.

16. Remove themes or skins of desktop, winamp, or any installed softwares that you hardly use.

17. You can turn off the hibernation feature to release 128 MB of disk space if you want to.