Three years ago, I would have run out of ideas on what to store on a 80 gig drive. Today, I’m practically running out of space on my 250 gig hard-drive. Internet is growing fast, and so are the number of stuff you simply can’t stay without downloading off it. Getting cheap external storage drives is really easy, but with a bit of poking around you can still squeeze out quite a number of gigs from your existing disk.

1.Remove unwanted System Restore points and shadow copies.

You’ll be amazed how much space the System Restore points can take up over time. Add to that the new “shadow copying” feature in Vista – ability to store previous versions of modified files – and you’re easily losing a good portion of your hard disk. If your PC is clean of any viruses and / or has no registry problems, you can safely delete most of these backups to free up some serious space. We’ve already shown you how to do that with Windows’ inbuilt Disk Cleanup, and also with the third-party CCleaner. Do note that Disk Cleanup will remove shadow copies, which CCleaner doesn’t.

I tried this after using my laptop for four months and recovered nearly 35GB space (almost 15% of the hard-disk space). Your mileage will of course vary depending on

  • your hard-disk size
  • how long you’ve been using your system
  • when was the last time you tried this method – the more frequently you try, the less effective it becomes.

2.Ditch that multi-GB game that you’ve already finished a dozen times.

Chances are you’ve completed some mighty big game/s a number of times, but haven’t cared about taking them off your PC. If so, proceed to Programs and Features (Vista) or Add / Remove Programs (XP) and uninstall these games from your computer. Considering the sizes of today’s games, you could recover a precious few gigs of space.

3.Go lean, go cloud.

As with games, you can also do away with any big-size software that you don’t use (like Dreamweaver and Photoshop). Do scroll through our “leanest PC pack” to pick up the smallest yet absolutely useful apps for your PC.

The ever increasing cloud <online> storage can keep quite a bit of your data. For example, you could easily keep all your documents, photos, and even a lot of music in the 25GB space offered by Windows Live SkyDrive. Then there are these cloud services which let you do most of your daily job like normal applications : Google Docs is a serious office / student suite, Photoshop Express brings the organising goodness of Lightroom and editing basics of Photoshop together, and meebo lets you talk to all your pals from all possible networks.

4.Track down duplicate files and remove them.

If you frequently download TV shows and other big videos from the Internet, chances are you might have downloaded the same video twice or more. Detecting and deleting these duplicates can help, as videos usually take up quite some space. DoubleKiller is a nice utility that notifies you of all duplicate copies on your PC.

5.Dude, go get an external.

Whatever you do, you simply can’t store 50.01GB of data in a 50GB disk. Heck, you can’t actually store 50GB of data either. If your hard disk is being too small for your needs, go get an external disk; they can store terabytes of data and are damn cheap anyway. Good deals can always be found at NewEgg.com.

 

How much space did you carve out of your hard disk? Say out in the comments. :)