Strange result from deleting programs.

[taichi]

After deleting several programs, and deleting their traces in the recycle bin in Vista 32 Ultimate, the free space on my hard drive went from just over 40 gigabytes to around 37 GB.

After doing some reading, it seems there is some rationale for using Vista's built-in Disc Cleaner to regain disk space. However I have also read cautionary tales about Disc Cleaner doing some real mischief.

Apparently some people have run into trouble with Disc Cleaner when they have run it after using third-party registry cleaners. I don't believe I ever installed anything like easy cleaner on this computer... it's not there now... but this may have slipped my mind due to stressful times.

Anyway, I'm trying to figure out the smartest thing to do at this point, and I would appreciate any help and clarification.

Running Vista 32 Ultimate on a T60P with 93 GB total on a 100 GB drive, presumably due to a restore partition.

Thanks,

Taichi

[ausmike]

hello tai chi
Seems you are not different to what I had kinda encountered few months ago.....

And I techie coworker put me on to this FREE software for 'good cleaning' of HD for WINDOWS OS. Software called "Ccleaner"

http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner

nope am not personally invovled with this company in anyway however I am using this on several of my personal laptops for over 6 mths and seems its worth my 'donation' of $20 per laptops use!!! .Its excellent for "HD" with opstions for free space consolidations and deletions of 'junk' etc. BTW my setup for Gutmann 35pass

Hope this helps

[Marin85]

@OP: Check your Vista System Protection / Recovery settings. Based on the total free space on your HD, it assigns certain amount to shadow copies and similar for recovery purposes. That would explain the changes in available free space. I don´t see anything wrong with Vista built-in disk cleaner. If you know what you are doing, it is probably the safest way to clean up some of the junk on your system (though it hasn´t as many options as CCleaner does, which is also a nice tool except for its registry cleaner, but that is another story...). It will scan your system and you will be presented some options to choose what to clean and what to preserve. Choose wisely!