Hello,
I thought a little house keeping would be useful for some of you so I though I would try and do some blog posts covering common issues. One of these issues is the operating system partition or C drive getting full. Here are a few tips and tricks to keep your computer running and your C drive clear.
The simplest of these is to ensure you keep all documents and data on secondary storage where possible.
In an office network environment there is usually storage available on the server available to store your data on. This is good for a number of reasons. Servers usually have redundancy built in so that there is less chance of losing your data. There is also usually a backup in place so that in the event of failure the data can be restored. So this not only keeps your drive nice and free but your data nice and safe.
In a home environment there are a number of products on the market which offer external storage, some of these with redundancy, which can be attached via a network or USB. Again keeping your data nice and safe and your computer running nicely.
Once you have moved all of this data there are a number of locations which Microsoft Windows creates temporary files in to help your computer run or perform certain processes, however they are not required once the process is complete and windows doesn’t delete them. To perform this process we must first change a couple of settings to get windows to show hidden files.
Open My Computer, click Tools, Folder options, View.
Select Show hidden files and folders and also untick Hide protected operating system files.
Now to the fun part. Deleting the files. When I delete these files I hold down the shift key while selecting delete. This performs a permanent delete i.e. the files do not get moved to the recycle bin.
The * is a wild card i.e. denotes all contents of the folder.
C:\temp\*
c:\windows\temp\*
The following two can be repeated for each user of the pc.
c:\Documents and settings\”user name”\local settings\temp\*
c:\Documents and settings\”user name”\local settings\Temporary internet files\*
These steps will free up a good chunk of space and keep you running.
It is important to put the setting we changed back so we need to go to My Computer and Tools and Folder Options, select the View tab and select Hide hidden files and folders and also tick Hide protected operating system files.
Good luck.
