You buy a brand new drive that seems so large that there aren’t
enough programs to fill it up! Given one year, you’ll be trying to find ways to save
space. Its a constant war to try to keep your hard drive space available, especially when
you surf the net regularly. Even if you don’t add any software to the system, your hard
drive space slowly dwindles away. Why?!

Well, here are some tips to save space.

• Run SCANDISK regularly, or another better program that
  does the same thing because SCANDISK certainly isn’t the best. Regardless, scan your hard
  disk often as part of preventive maintenance. This optimizes its operation and recovers
  lost space being held by lost data.
• Defragment your drive at least once per month. You can use
  DEFRAG that comes with Windows, or a better option. Over time, files can get chopped up
  and spread all over the drive, causing your drive to have to look all over the place to
  operate. Defragmenting the drive, thus, increases performance, while recovering lost
  space.
• Organize your files. This doesn’t help performance or
  space, but it sure helps your mental state. Give directories names that make sense when
  installing them. Store your data files in a directory all their own. Remember, Windows 95
  supports long file names. Take advantage of this so that things make sense.
• Make sure you are using the FAT32 system if you have
  Windows 95 OSR2, Win98 or some other FAT32 capable OS. Doing so will save you tons of space due
  to slack.
• If you want, you can repartition your drive to take better
  advantage of the space available. With a smaller partition, you can use smaller clusters.
  Therefore, less space is wasted. This is easiest to do when the drive is new. If you want
  to repartition the drive with data on it, you will need a secondary program like
  PartitionMagic to do it and keep your data intact.
• Empty the Recycling Bin. When you delete a file under
  Windows 9x, it doesn’t really go away. It goes to the Recycling Bin. If you forget about
  this, you could have several megabytes of space wrapped up in files you thought were gone.
• Empty your Internet Cache. If you do a lot of surfing,
  your cache gets bloated. And just because you limit the cache to 5MB or so doesn’t mean a
  thing. that’s 5 MB of actual files, therefore, if you take slack into account, you could
  be using as much as 60 MB!
• Trash your plug-ins. well, not all of them. But, go into
  your web browser and bring up a list of installed plug-ins. Get rid of the ones you don’t
  need. Cleansweep’s Internet Sweep is great for this.
• You can also clear out your IE
  History folder and TEMP directory. Your History folder is what
  stores all URLs you have been to, so that IE can automatically
  fill-in the URL for you as you type. Locate the History folder under
  Windows, and delete if you want. Same thing with TEMP directory.
• Purge Windows 95. This can be tricky, and can get you into
  trouble. But, the idea is to browse the Windows 95 and Windows directories and delete
  unused components. Most programs install components into these directories, and they stay
  there even after the program is removed.
• Delete unused fonts. go to Control Panel, and click on
  fonts. Delete useless fonts, as they take up lots of space and slow down the system. Don’t
  delete any with a red "A" next to them, as these are Windows
  system fonts.
• Disk Compression. I generally stay clear of such things,
  but it is possible to compress your drive and get up to 2X the amount of space out of it.
  The reason I stay clear is that it reduces performance and increases the chances of
  problems.

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