how to free up hard drive space

[sputnik611]

greetings - a quick question. how do you free up hard drive space on a new x300 running xp? I have 41G of free space on my new computer (out of 64G). is there some trick to freeing up some more space? i feel like i've read about it somewhere on the forums but can't find it. many thanks.

[Thecla]

Do you have a rescue and recovery partition on your drive? If so, you can see it and delete it by launching rescue and recovery from the Thinkvantage folder, and going to the advanced version (I have vista but I think it's similar on XP). Then you can use an external usb drive to save your R&R backups.

[rkawakami]

Here's my usual procedure to reclaim disk space....

- use Windows Add or Remove Programs utility to remove all old installs of Java; each obsolete version takes 100MB+ (currently the latest is Version 6 Update 11)
- go into the C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\Temp folder and remove files that are a few months old; mostly they are .TMP files but there can also be some .EXE and document files you've downloaded
- purge each browser's cache and then double-check the "Temporary Internet Files" folder under the same "\Local Settings" path as above
- turn off System Restore and then re-enable it (this deletes all restore points and creates a new one); the danger here is that you might be getting rid of older restore points that are useful in case your system has a problem, however, this can yield a couple of GB of space if you've "filled up" your allotted quota
- and if you're the daring type, delete the Windows Service Pack folders (Google "remove windows xp service pack folder") to see how

edit: I'm assuming you've gone through the places where you normally store/work with your files and deleted or backed them up. And that you've also emptied the "Recycle Bin".

[Marin85]

Also, you may want to run Disk Cleanup (All programs -> Acessories -> System Tools). It gives pretty much good overview of what you may want to get rid of including the hibernation file. If you don´t use suspend to disk (you can use suspend to RAM instead), you really don´t need this file, AFAIK it takes up about 4 GB of your disk space. I assume you have Vista OS installed, so in addition to what rkawakami suggests you may also want to get rid of all Shadow Copies made by System Restore. Shadow Copies are actually the main reason why most Vista users observe noticeably decreasing free disk space over time. Vista just likes to make copies of everything you have ever used and this can really get tons of GBs (hm, interesting expression ).

Hope this helps

Marin

[sputnik611]

thank you all for your responses. I will try some of the things you suggest.