Disk Cleanup

The Disk cleanup wizard is a good way to delete certain items from the operating system that continuously build up and waste hard disk space as well as slow the pc down. If you find that your pc may be running slower than usual, especially your web browser, then you should run the disk cleanup wizard to clear some temporary files. In vista you now how the ability to clear files from all the users using the operating system. You will need administrative access first because you will be prompted with the UAC window for clearing all users temporary files. If you just clear up your files you will not need to authenticate anything. When you first start the wizard you will see the screenshot below, choose which option you would like to use to proceed.

Next, you have a choice of which drive you would like to cleanup, so if you have multiple drives you can choose specific drives. Select the one you wish to use. You will see the drive that holds the system files and usually the temporary internet files also by seeing a windows flag icon in front of the drive, this is most likely to be the drive to choose to use disk cleanup on.

It may take a couple of minutes to complete the check of how much space you can save so if you see the window below for a few minutes it should not be a problem, just wait until it completes.

You now should see the window shown below which has a list of options you can either enable or disable with the amount of space those options are taking up as well as a total of space you could save if you selected all options shown below the selection under the heading Total amount of disk space you gain. When you select particular options you can also click the View Files button towards the bottom of the window in order to check for yourself that you do not need any of those files, examples would be if you have something in the recycle bin you may wish to recover, as one of the options will empty all files from the recycle bin. Once you have made all the nescessary selections, click Ok and the disk cleanup wizard can start.

Once you click Ok you will get a prompt asking you if you want to permanently delete the files, if you are unsure, click Cancel, however if you want to go ahead, click the Delete Files button. In most cases you can go ahead and click the Delete Files button as most of the options are generally just temporary and will not affect the operating system, but you can check to make sure by using the View Files button seen above if you are unsure.

Once you have clicked Delete files, the disk cleanup will go ahead and delete those files and you may notice more disk space and some speed improvements in some cases.