Get your hard drive back in the fast lane

How much stuff sits on your hard drive? If it's like ours, you have many files of dubious virtue loitering in every nook and cranny--temporary Internet files, downloaded program files, and the like. To get an idea of how much space you're wasting, go to Start > Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Disk Cleanup, and Windows will calculate how much space you can free up by performing this step. When it's finished, you'll see a list of file types with checks next to the ones Windows proposes sending off to the bit bucket, along with the space occupied by each category and the total amount of space you can reclaim if you let Disk Cleanup erase each checked category.

To see what's in the files Windows wants to delete, highlight one of the categories and select View Files. If the figure represents a negligible percentage of total disk space and you're not sure you really want to dump anything, forget about a cleanup at this time. Or, open the Recycle Bin and sort its contents by date. Highlight anything older than, say, one month, and delete just the highlighted files.