www.jstechs.com > System Tools > Disk Cleanup
With Windows XP, a little regular cleanup goes a long way to help maintain your system and keep it running smoothly. Also, cleaning out all the temporary files allows you in most cases to gain back large amounts of hard disk space.
Although there are third party utilities such as CCleaner that are, in my opinion better; the inbuilt Disk Cleanup utility is useful in performing basic cleanup tasks.
First though, a little side issue.
Every time you run Disk Cleanup it not only checks to see what can be removed, but it also checks to see how much space could be gained by compressing old files. If you know that you don't want to compress your old files this can be nothing more than a great waste of time.
If you want to disable this feature you can do so by deleting the data from a key in the registry. However, If you are inexperienced with the Windows Registry, or are not sure; I suggest you skip down to "Running Disk Cleanup" as it is easy to cause a great deal of harm very quickly editing the Windows Registry.
NOTE: Before making any modifications to the Windows Registry
please click here.
To disable this feature navigate to: "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \SOFTWARE\Microsoft\ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Explorer \ VolumeCaches \ Compress old files", open the (Default) key and delete the string of data inside.
Running Disk Cleanup
To start Disk Cleanup go to: Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > click Disk Cleanup. You should immediatly see a window like this one.
When scanning is complete you will be presented with the following options:
For a description of each option simply click the name and you will see an explanation of what is to be removed in the "Description" box. Normally you can just check all the boxes and click OK > Yes.
