Although they’re jolly useful, old restore points just sit there taking up a fair bit of hard disk space. (For those who aren’t aware of this useful feature, you can use them to undo harmful changes to your computer and restore its settings and performance to a state before the nasty change happened, without losing recent work such as saved documents, emails, etc.)

My System Mechanic defragging utility was having trouble defragging the restore files - it was taking ages. I couldn’t find out how to delete them safely until I wandered onto the ‘More Options’ tab from Windows’ Disk Cleanup program.

Here’s how to create (and restore) a System Restore point:

START > Programs > Accessories > System Tools > System Restore

Here’s how to get rid of all but the last Restore point:

START > Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Disk Cleanup > More Options (Then hit CLEAN UP under the System Restore section.) Voila. Less bloat and more hard drive space.

Thanks to tip subscriber Matt Lord for providing this tip.