Oops, hard disk is full!
You have a fairly new computer and yet you suddenly find that its hard disk is almost full. What is the cause, how do you resolve the problem and, even better, how do you prevent it from happening?
Should be big enough
New computers are equipped with hard disks hundreds of gigabytes large. Even if you have loads of photos and videos, it will take a long time to fill the hard disk. So when a Windows pop-up suddenly warns you that your hard disk is almost full, it’s time to find out what’s gone wrong!
Miscalculation?
Chances are that Windows has made a mistake calculating the empty space. You can check this by means of the Windows Checkdisk function: in Windows Explorer, right-click on a drive and select Properties; Tools; Error-checking; Check now. If it’s the C drive that’s causing problems, it’s best to reboot Windows before starting the check.
Check for malware
Viruses or malware can also gobble up lots of free disk space. If you have no (updated) virus scanner installed, scan your hard disk for malware using one or more online scanners such as FreeScan (http://home.mcafee.com/Downloads/FreeScan.aspx), HouseCall (http://housecall.trendmicro.com/uk/) or Security Check (http://security.symantec.com/sscv6/home.asp). You can of course install a “real” virus scanner as well, such as the free Microsoft Security Essentials (http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/).
Remove temporary files
You may also be wasting gigabytes of space because of temporary Internet files. You can remove them in your browser, but a better solution is CCleaner (http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner). This free tool traces all superfluous files produced by Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari and Windows.
Suspicious programs?
When the hard disk LED is flashing almost constantly, this means that your computer is doing something. The free What’s my computer doing tool (http://www.itsth.com/en/produkte/Whats-my-computer-doing.php) allows you to check what’s going on in the background. The tool indicates where there’s any activity for each program (hard disk and/or processor) and when the last activity took place. Tip. Click on Also show processes in order to list them.
Perform a system restore
If the above tips don’t help, perform a Windows System Restore. This restores your Windows to a previous - and hopefully better - version. No programs and documents are removed; only the system files are restored to their previous state. However, if you’ve installed hardware, drivers or updates recently, you will have to reinstall them - but then again, they may be the very cause of the problem. Click on Start and type system restore in order to start the process. Select the most recent restore point - if this doesn’t solve the problem, select an older restore point.
Reinstall Windows
If this doesn’t help either, the only thing left to do is to reinstall Windows. To prevent having to do so in the future, it’s best to make a regular image backup of your hard drive, for instance using DriveImage XML (http://www.runtime.org/driveimage-xml.htm - free).
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