Hi Gang.  Today I want to talk about your hard drive space and how low disk space can cause you to have sluggish computer.  These days, new computers are coming with HUGE hard drives.  You can get them with 160 gigs up to 1024 gigs.  That’s a lot of space.  My concern is for the folks that have older computers with 20, 40 & 80 gig hard drives.  In order to keep these drives at their optimal efficiency, we need to do regular maintenance which will hopefully increase the speed of a computer running slow.  These drives also need to be cleaned out regularly so they don’t run out of space.  So, today I will be discussing hard drive maintenance as a possible slow computer fix.

I will go over the following Free Tools which will help in the process of fixing a slow computer:

• Disk Cleanup
• Scan Disk
• Defrag
• CCleaner

When your hard drive begins to run out of disk space, you will notice your computer slowing down and it’s probably time to do a little maintenance.  First, you really need to go through your computer and remove files and programs that you no longer use.  To remove programs you no longer use, click on the Start Button -> Control Panel -> Add or Remove Programs and remove any programs you no longer use.  These programs may be old games you don’t play any more or maybe you have trial versions of programs you no longer need.  Don’t remove programs you are unsure of.  You can always do a Google search to find out what a program is and whether you need it on your computer.

Now that the old programs are removed, lets run Disk Cleanup.  Click on the Start Button -> All Programs – > Accessories -> System Tools -> Disk Cleanup.  When you click on Disk Cleanup, it will start to scan your computer files that are no longer need and when done it will show you a report of how much space it can free up.

Disk Cleanup

As you can see in the image above, this computer has 9 gigs (WOW!!) of disk space that can be freed up by using this tool.  You can scroll through the list and place a check mark next to the items you would like removed from your computer.  These files are mainly going to be files in the Temp directories or old compressed files.  These file are ok to remove.  The next step would be to press the “OK” button and let your computer clean up the hard drive for you.  It’s a good idea to set a maintenance schedule and run this program about once a month.

Now that the computer has been cleaned up a bit, lets scan the hard drive for errors.  As a hard drive ages, it can develop bad sectors which could cripple your computer if the bad sector is where windows system files are stored, so it’s a good idea to scan your hard drive for errors every couple of months.  To start the scan disk program, double-click you “My Computer” icon.  Then, right-click on the C: Drive (local disk C) and from the menu that pops up pick “Properties”.  Now, click on the Tools tab and then click the “Check Now” button in the “Error Checking” section.  This will start the program and bring you to the disk options menu.  Check both boxes like the image below:

Scan Disk - Check both boxes to fix errors and sectors

This Scan Disk program needs to run in Dos mode to completely check your hard drive without interfering with Windows so the program will tell you that it will start the next time the computer is rebooted.  Close all of your programs and go ahead and reboot now to run the hard drive scan.  When your computer reboots, it will come to a blue screen that goes through a number of steps for scanning your hard drive for errors which could help in the process to fix slow pc.  Once it is complete, the computer will boot into Windows like normal.

In my next post, “Slow Computer Fix: Part II“, I will discuss the other two Tools: Defrag and CCleaner.  Fixing a slow computer can be a tedious process and can require many steps, so be sure to check out How to Fix a Slow Computer – Part I and How to Fix a Slow Computer – Part II.

Take it easy,

Steve