Runing out of room on your hard drive? Well so is Donna from San Antonio TX who writes “I only have 12.0gb left on my computer how do i get more room in my P,C, sORRY i AM LEGALLY BLIND SO EXCUSE MY TYPIng. God bless you”
Hi, Donna. Thanks for the great question, and no problem on the typing. I know sighted people who type worse than you do.
There are a couple of ways to increase the amount of space that you have available on your machine. One is to run disc clean-up. Just out of curiosity, I ran it on my machine and discovered that I could only free up 131 MB of disc space. Clean up removes things like temporary internet files and old versions of programs. You can also choose which types of files you want it to remove. The easiest way to run clean-up in Windows 8 is to mouse to the lower right hand side of the screen to open your Charms, click on the SEARCH charm, which looks like a magnifying glass and type CLEAN UP in the search box. Then click FREE UP DISC SPACE BY DELETING UNNECESSARY FILES. In previous versions of Windows, simply click the START button, enter CLEAN UP in the search box, and click on DISC CLEAN-UP.
This will open the disc clean-up dialog box. First, it will ask you to choose which drive you want to clean (this will typically be your Windows drive, usually C:. Then it will calculate the amount of space that you can reclaim. When it’s done with that, it will open a dialog box allowing you to choose which types of files to clean.
As you choose files to clean, it will increase or decrease the amount of space you’ll reclaim, and then click OK.
Another way to clean up disc space is to simply uninstall any programs that you’re not currently using. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I know that I will install a program thinking that I would use it later, and then wind up never using it. You can also uninstall bloatware, which is a program that’s installed peripherally with a program that you actually want. An example of this for me is a McAfee program that gets installed whenever I update Flash player. I always uninstall this program immediately, because I use AVG security software and don’t want or need it.
To uninstall a program, go to your control panel (from the home menu on 8 and the start menu on all other versions), click on PROGRAMS AND FEATURES, click the program that you want to remove and then click UNINSTALL.
If these steps don’t free up the amount of space that you need, it may be time to visit your friendly neighborhood computer geek and upgrade your hard drive or your machine. You can also purchase an external hard drive and move your documents, pictures, videos, etc., to that and free up some space that way.
I hope that this helps!
~ Randal Schaffer
I have chrome. what are the procedures for that. What a great column. Mike
Hi Randal, I was surprised you go through the fuss of installing and then uninstalling McAfee along with Flash Player updates. I have always kept a strict eye open for bloatware, having suffered the odd catastrophe by installing malware along with wanted programs. On the Flash player updates, there is a tick box, (pre-ticked), which you can untick before installing Flash player. Much less trouble than uninstalling it. Furthermore, McAfee is one of those programs which leaves lots of rubbish behind even after you’ve uninstalled it, and it’s quite difficult to uninstall it fully. Prevention is always better than cure.
Hi, Mike.
This article is for Windows in general, not a specific browser. Can you be more specific with what clarification you need? Thanks.
Randal
Thanks Randal, great suggestions. I’ve used them all & I actually ran out of space once. I especially use the ExHD for photos which I have zillions of in my PC. I run two ExHDs and delete, delete, delete PC photos til I regain space. You can always go to ExHD to view them, even edit them and if desired re-import them to PC. Have fun deleting! Trish