Locating Dirty Hard Drives

For some people, the hard drive is a black hole where data disappears and reappears as needed. In fact, it’s quite possible that some users don’t even realize their system has a hard drive and that it’s a finite resource. All they know is that My Documents exists somewhere and it has all of their data. Unfortunately, this lack of knowledge is the source of many problems—most of which are quite easy to fix.

The fix begins by knowing how to check the hard drive. Windows provides this information in a number of ways, all of which it hides from the average user. For example, most users have no idea of what purpose the My Computer icon serves. All they know is that it’s another icon on the desktop. Double-click this icon to open it and you see a list of drives that your system can access. Figure 2.5 shows a typical example of a machine with both removable storage and a network connection.

The entries of concern are the hard drives that appear at the top of the list. Right-click any of these entries and choose Properties from the context menu. You’ll see a display similar to the one shown in Figure 2.6.

FIGURE 2.5 My Computer shows all of the drives you can access from your system.

FIGURE 2.6 The pie chart shows how much disk space is left on your system.

This figure shows a healthy hard drive — it has at least 25 percent of its space left. If this figure falls below 25 percent, it’s time to start looking for old data to archive, temporary files to delete, and Internet files to remove. Chapters 3 and 5 tell you more about this process, but for now, consider any harddrive choked with files as a potential cleaning candidate. The less hard drive space remaining, the more critical it is that you begin cleaning immediately. Figure 2.6 also shows two potential fixes for your hard drive problem.

Click Disk Cleanup This utility helps you look for common areas of the hard drive that can contain excess files, such as temporary files. The “Using Disk Cleanup” section of Chapter 8 tells how to use this utility.

Check Compress Drive to Save Disk Space This option can take a little while to execute, but it’s well worth the effort. When you check this option, the system asks whether you’re sure that you want to compress the drive and asks which files to compress. Always compress everything that you can on the hard drive. Compressing your hard drive is akin to creating a giant ZIP file, but in this case, the support for reading the file is built into the operating system and the emphasis is on speed, rather than absolute compression.

TIP Depending on the kind of data stored on your hard drive, you can double the amount of available space by compressing it —executable files compress a lot less than most data files do. Compressing hard drives with graphics files can save a tremendous amount of space because graphics compress extremely well in many cases. Unfortunately, it’s also possible that the graphics application has already compressed the graphics files, as is the case with some Tagged Image File Format (TIFF), which means you won’t see much of a compression effect. Even so, disk compression is a very easy way to increase your disk space one time.