Saved Stuff

Most of the stuff you've saved, you obviously needed to keep at one time, but do you need it now? What about those saved games from that game you uninstalled two years ago? That 100 meg installer for some program that you downloaded and already installed? Poke around in 'My Documents' and 'Desktop' every once in a while and see if there's anything that you aren't going to need again. (It's easier to organize your desktop if you look at it from inside Explorer instead of trying to deal with the icons sitting on your desktop.)

This is a lot easier if you organize things, obviously. I keep both my Desktop and My Documents empty, putting everything in folders, and things get downloaded to my Desktop or saved to My Documents. So every week or so I look in there and deal with everything by sorting into the folders or deleting them. But that's just how I do it.

Temp files

The easiest to find is in C:\WINDOWS\. See all those $NtUninstall directories? See the $hf_mig$ directory and the stuff in it? Well, those are the uninstall information for the various Windows updates you've installed.

Most people will, under no circumstances, ever uninstall Windows updates. You can safely delete all the $* directories in C:\WINDOWS\.

The next thing is somewhat hard to find. Go to C:\Documents and Settings\Your Name\Local Settings\Temp\, where 'Your Name' is the name at the top of your start menu. Lots of files. Make sure you've closed everything and start deleting stuff. Seriously, delete it all.

At some point, you'll get an error saying explorer can't delete a file because it's in use. Just skip any of those and keep going. The easiest thing to do is to sort by 'Date Modified' and delete everything before today at once, and then slowly try to delete today's files. (Or just don't worry about today.)

While you're there, you can check in 'Temporary Internet Files' and 'History' next door, and delete stuff there if you want. Watch out, your cookies are in 'Temporary Internet Files', and if you delete all those you'll have to log back in to all websites. (A better solution for managing cache, history, and cookie files is to buy antispyware software.)

And don't forget other users. They have those directories too. Depending on permissions, you may need to login as them to clean their temp files out.

There is also a C:\WINDOWS\TEMP directory. Sometimes stuff ends up there. Don't worry about the Perflib_* files, that's something to do with optimizing defragmentation and they're pretty small. Delete them if you want, they'll just be back.