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Disk Cleanup
Here's how to get rid of temporary files that bloat and take up space on your machine. This is a process that can take up to 15 minutes or even more, if you have accumulated a lot of temp files. I recommend doing this once a week at first, and depending on how much stuff you have to clean up, use your judgement and scale it back to once a month eventually. Go to "My Computer" and locate your hard drive, in most cases called "C:" Right-click the drive, and choose "Properties" from the dialogue that pops up. You will see the following:
Note that you probably don't want to change any of the options (for example, "compress drive") listed, unless you are comfortable with what you're doing. Locate the "Disk Cleanup" button toward the lower middle and to the right. Once you press it, another dialogue box will appear and the Cleanup utility begins to work:
At this point, go ahead and let the machine do its work. This stage can take up to 10 minutes or more, depending on how much stuff has accumulated on your machine.You can go back and keep working on something else if you wish, but if you do, your computer will "handle" very slowly while this "Disk Cleanup Calculating" takes place. Finally, a dialogue like the one below pops up. Note the scroll bar to the right, there's usually something else hiding there. Check all the boxes that have a number of KB (this tells you how much space is taken by the files in question). Everything there is safe to delete. Note that in my example I have no downloaded program files or temp files, but I checked some boxes for demonstration.
You can click "view files" if you are curious, and when ready, click "OK." This will launch the Cleaner, and might take a few additional minutes to complete. That's it!
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