PC Workout

Free the Disk Space

You know how sleepy you feel after a big Thanksgiving turkey meal? Your PC can get that same feeling. A full or nearly full hard drive can dramatically slow Windows. In such situations, you have no choice: Trim the excess fat from the hard drive.

You can do that with surgical accuracy using a handy, built-in Windows 98 tool called Disk Cleanup. You could set it to run only when you get desperately short of disk space--but why wait until it's too late? If you delete as you go, you may never run short of disk space at all.

Use Your Hard Drive Housekeeper

Disk Cleanup does some of the hard drive housework for you: It hunts down and clears out disposable files. To summon this magic housekeeper, open My Computer and right-click the icon for your main hard drive (usually labeled C:). Select the Properties option from the menu.

In the dialog box that pops up, you'll see a pie chart that shows how much disk space you have free. Next to it, you'll see a button labeled Disk Cleanup. Click that button to run the cleanup utility, and Windows will find all of your disposable files--such as cached temporary Internet files, deleted files in the Recycle Bin, and (if you upgraded to this version of Windows from an earlier one) dozens of megabytes of uninstall files. All of those can be deleted to free up disk space: Place a check mark next to each item you're prepared to delete, then click the OK button and let Disk Cleanup do its stuff.

Lose the Useless Programs

Your hard drive may also be full of dusty, unused programs. PCs bought with installed software often have lots of programs you have no interest in. The trick is to track 'em down and get rid of 'em. Disk Cleanup provides quick access to the tools you need to remove bits of Windows or other programs--just click the More Options tab, and then click the Clean Up button for either Windows components or installed programs.

The Windows Setup option provides a list of categories and components with check boxes. To remove one, click its box to remove the check mark. If you want to selectively remove features, double-click a category and click to remove individual items. (Who needs all those screen savers?) When you click the Apply button, Windows uninstalls the software. If you later find that you need some of the Windows components, you can always reinstall them by clicking the check box next to the items you need.

As for programs, only you know what you don't use, and Windows 98 doesn't help much. Windows 2000 provides much better clues, grading how often you use the program, from rarely to frequently. We're willing to bet you'll find a couple that you don't ever use anymore.