When I try to run a program, a warning will come up and telling me that PC gets low disk space. Just a newbie question, how can I remove all those useless stuff? OS:win8

You could start by cleaning out temporary files by using something like CCleaner

If that doesn't do it, you will have to decide which data files and or applications you can bear to part with.

Most modern computers seem to come equipped with at least 250G, often more. Since you're running Win8, I'm assuming the computer isn't all that old.

Click on My Computer and see how big the drive is and how much free space is left. If it seems way out of line, maybe some sort of virus is slowly consuming the free space on the drive. If it seems normal, and you seem to have a lot of free space left, You've got another problem (which I'm not sure what it is)

If you have an SSD, it might be quite small (compared with the spinning platter variety) and you may just have to get a bigger drive.

Or get an external and throw all of the files that you're not actively using onto there?

Before that, running the Windows built-in cleaner should always be the first step. It's dead easy; just go to "This PC" ("My computer" on XP/7, "Computer" on Vista) and then right click on the drive (normally "C:") and select properties.

When the properties box comes up, click on the "Disk Cleanup" button on the right side next to the space pie chart.

When it comes up, make sure all the options are checked. If it finds a fair bit of space to clean up, click OK.

If it doesn't find a lot of space to free up, try the "clean up system files" button; that will often find more to clean up

Under the system files mode, "More Options" tab will also appear, and using the lower "Clean up" button under "System restore and shadow copies" will often (but not always) free up a lot of space.

Lastly, by default Windows will use a huge pagefile, and have a hibernate file; minimizing the page file size (around 1gb, for example) and removing the hibernate file will both typically save a lot of space (especially on a machine with a lot of memory.)

Before we get all techie and very specific here, remember: we have almost no information (other than the OS) about what is really happening here -

1. How big is the hard drive?
2. Is it a hard drive or SSD?
3. What is the computer being used for? Net cruising? SETI calcs?
4. What is the liklihood that the disk is actually full of valid files?
5. Does it only happen on one app or everything? Which app(s)?
6. How much RAM?
7. etc.

I don't go to the doctor and say, "One of my legs hurts." and expect him to say, "Here. Take this pill. Next."

OTOH, if you go to the mechanic don't be surprised if he's asked if you kept up with regular oil changes. Clearing temp files is basic machine hygiene/maintenance, just like keeping up on security patches is. It's not unreasonable to check those BEFORE looking for underlying problems.

(Just like if someone says "my machine won't turn on," you want to look at "is it plugged in" before anything else.)

Respectfully, nkedel, these are two different things. When I buy a new car, the manufacturer provides me with an owner's manual which sets forth a maintenance schedule of such things as oil changes. I have seen the documentation for new computers from Sony, Toshiba and Lenovo (and perhaps others as well) and I have never seen one word about maintenance, particularly file deletion.

This is your field (you're an engineer, if I recall correctly) so you know these things. If a company expects me to, e.g. delete the contents of C:\Windows\Temp they should tell me when, how and why.

Without such instruction I think it is indeed unreasonable to expect the customer to do so. How would I know that otherwise?

I've never seen operating-system-level documentation worth a damn from a PC manufacturer since the end of the Windows 3.x days... not that there's any documentation worth a damn that comes with most PCs these days.

I really like Dell because they provided easy access to the service/disassembly manuals, unlike a lot of manufacturers, but they provide ZERO OS-level documentation with many systems (and when they do it's for system-specific features, or driver installation.)

The business-line Lenovos are similar. I haven't bought Sony ever, and the last time I bought Toshiba documentation tended to be less cursory (not that I bothered to read it, and they were at the time very much LESS than prone to sharing service/disassembly instructions.)

The hardware itself is agnostic to the OS, and it could well be running Linux instead (where many distributions will clear /tmp via cron job.)

Take that up with Microsoft, not the PC manufacturers. They've slowly been making standard (first by recommendation, then by inclusion, and eventually automation) plenty of things like antivirus, file system defragmentation (except on SSDs) and backup, all of which most genuinely computer literate people already knew about.

Indeed, the disk cleanup wizard was offered (starting in XP? a long time ago, at any rate) to clean up stuff like temp files. The system will in some cases ask you if you want to run it

Moreover, (at least prior to the "Metro" world on Windows 8) Microsoft has absolutely no control over what software you run, and how it uses temp space. It would be nice if all applications used it in ways which cleaned up after themselves (and indeed, even back to DOS, every operating system I'm aware of provides APIs which encourage doing exactly that!) but sometimes applications shut down in unexpected ways and can't, or whole machines crash, or applications are simply badly written. Some others use temp directories in ways which are semi-permanent.

If you're not prepared to manage a file system manually, use an iOS device which manages it for you, and accept the massive loss of flexibility that such a model entails.

PC operating systems are not nearly as mature a consumer market as automobiles, and PCs are a much cheaper, and more flexibile/versatile product from . Back when computers cost as much as cars, you had a more reasonable call on documentation (and on an expectation of training.)

Preaching to the choir, dude.

I blame everyone. But if you want me to be more specific, tell me whom to blame for having unlisted and undocumented programs on my computer without telling me what to do with them. For example, Start>Run>MSCONFIG is for what exactly? When do I use it and why? How about Start>Run>SERVICES? Or better yet, my favorite, REGEDIT? Laptops are sold as a consumer item but using these things are multiple levels above the average consumer, even me who has two university degrees.


Yes, but apparently I cannot trust the utilities that come with the computer since I have Disk Defrag with Win 7 but I read in places like this forum that I shouldn't use it on my SSD.

Oh yes, there's also the mysterious TRIM. I still have no idea what it is, where it is and what to do with it.

First, as I said, I blame both the computer manufacturer and the operating system manufacturer. Second, if you market a computer for use in business, then it and its operating system should reasonably be able to handle business uses.

Third, addressing directly your point about Microsoft, Microsoft should reasonably anticipate that for a business computer I will be using Office. Unlike Microsoft, I have no control over how Outlook, Word, Excel, Internet Explorer, etc., etc. use and manage temp space. That's really something, telling me that they sold me Windows and Office but how the two interact is my problem?

I think you meant OS. If I am right, I must have learned something from you here.



Sorry, but I don't agree. There is way too much a "blame the customer" attitude I detect in the computer business. I received more documentation with my $300 clothes washing machine than I did with my $3,000 laptop.

(I hope you do not consider anything I write her antagonistic. I value the help and advice you provide on this forum. ^^)

SSDs don't need to be defragmented (and Windows versions that are aware of them won't do it). The object was to minimize the movement of the drive heads, but SSDs don't have drive heads and don't have a penalty for out-of-order accesses, so no defrag.

TRIM: SSD data blocks have to be erased before being reused, and it's a relatively slow operation. Without TRIM, when a data block is reused, it has to be erased first then written, slowing down the operation.

TRIM is a method for the operating system (like Windows) to tell the drive that a block is no longer in use. The drive can then erase it in the background, so it's already erased when the OS wants to reuse it.

Also, if you have a system with an SSD and a hard drive, you can relocate your Documents, Videos, Music, etc. folders to the hard drive. Right-click the folder and pick Properties. You can relocate them on the Location tab.

One other way for clearing space, besides the disk cleanup tool, is to do an advanced search for "gigantic" files. This might identify files you can get rid of, but use caution. Don't delete anything under "Program Files" or "Windows" without really knowing what they are.

I don't; as someone who worked the desktop-support/sysadmin track before jumping over to software engineering after college, I'd have been out of a job if these things "just worked" (and no, contrary to Apple fanboys, that's not the case with MacOS X -- it has its own quirks and maintenance issues.)

It comes pretty close with both Android and iOS devices, but they're a great deal more limited in what you can do with them, and when you start trying to use them as truly general purpose computing devices, abstracting away the file system limits you. It's still there; just hidden (but still accessible) on Android, and not directly accessible on a non-jailbroken iOS device ... and can get you into just as much trouble as a regular PC/Mac.

None of those are necessary for an average user in day to day use; they are very useful tools for debugging or optimizing things, and actually reasonably well documented for those who know where to look.

OTOH, "where to look" never involves the involves either:
A) an advanced-user manual from the (from a third party, or Microsoft itself); it's been a while since I've looked, but "Windows 7 Annoyances" (from O'Reilly), and "Windows 7: The Missing Manual" were pretty good starts for most power users. For Windows 8, the freebie electronic copies of "Windows 8 For Dummies" that Dell was distributing a year ago when it came out were pretty good.

B) Web-based documentation from Microsoft, which is copious and these days mostly pretty good, and which scales from total-newbie how-to videos ( http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/w...arted#T1=tab01 ) to Technet/MSDN (most of the articles are free online.)

(There's also copious help text built into Windows itself.)

(Total aside: Microsoft distributes for free -- as an e-copy -- a very good basic introduction to security intended for tween-to-late-teens: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/downl...s.aspx?id=1522 called "Own Your Space" -- it's worth looking at for less-technical adults, other than a chapter on Cyber-bullying which I would hope is irrelevant to anyone over about 16.)

Computer manufacturers COULD include one of the former in the box, but very few people want to pay for it, and what would be useful for a beginning user would be useless for an intermediate user, and so on.

Depends on what you do with it, and each iteration of Windows has been better at maintaining itself back to the changeover from 3.x to 95. These are probably the most complicated devices most people deal with in their lives; the number of engineering hours having gone into the different levels of hardware and software working on a PC today probably dwarfs the moon landing.

On Windows 7, you should never think about it. Windows 7, virtually all the time, will correctly run it on a rotational disk and not run it on SSD. Most aftermarket SSDs come with a tuning application (Intel SSD toolbox, etc) which will check those settings for you.

On Vista, this is an issue (since Vista is too old to know about SSDs), but anyone running Vista is by definition able to run Windows 7 on that hardware and should absolutely upgrade. If it were Microsoft today, that would have been free the way Windows 8 to 8.1 was.

On XP and older versions of Windows, it did not run automatically, and you needn't worry about it on SSD (but probably want to occasionally run it on spinning disks.) Personally, I'd recommend going to Windows 7, unless the hardware is really old.

Unless you're either (A) a tech professional, (B) an enthusiast who tweaks for the fun of it, or (C) are upgrading an old PC that didn't come with an SSD out of the box, you don't need to.

Given that a there are a lot of older PCs out there which are fine otherwise, but will be happier with an SSD, it's worth knowing a minimum about at the time you upgrade to the SSD, but after that you can forget about it.

It'll all be taken care of by the manufacturer (or systems integrator, if you buy a whitebox system) on a new machine.

Fair enough; I missed that in your earlier message, and took it as an indictment purely of the PC manufacturer (who generally, these days, just exists to repackage and market electronics engineered by Intel -- and for laptops, a handful of ODMs -- and software engineered by Microsoft, with a minimal value added) at what is in essence a commodity markup.

"Use in business" is a vague term, but most are.

Office tends to produce relatively little temp file junk compared to other software, in part because MS knows their own APIs and because it's a pretty mature product.

For a lot of the other stuff, most software is written these days with the assumption of memory and disk space as nearly unlimited resources. As someone who got started on 8-bit, 64k systems*, it's kind of depressing although it does make life much easier as a developer.

Google's windows software and Adobe's both tend to be particular active in their use of temp space, and both tend to crash more than Microsoft's own stuff.

(* yes, 64, not 640k -- the mid/late-1980s XT-clone generation of early PCs where you could depend on 256k-640k were MUCH bigger machines than the Commodores I started learning on as a kid a few years earlier.)

No, I mean "iOS" -- the operating system that the iPad and iPhone and iPod Touch have in common. It is as much a maintenance-free system as exists out there, but it comes at a huge cost in inflexibility.

Not many people buy $3000 laptops; for consumers, most of the market is sub-$700, and even corporate machines have been trending cheaper for years. Only Apple is able to move a lot of volume at the higher end. The market has been very clear that it wants to pay as little as possible for PCs and for the most part won't pay for frills... like printed documentation (which even Apple avoids.)

Further, odds are if you count documentation installed on your hard drive, there's a LOT more documentation already on your computer. Just hit "F1" on the desktop (which is largely forgotten, but is the standard "help" button in Windows.)

Thanks! I don't find it antagonistic to me, and it feels a bit odd to be defending Micro$oft or the big PC manufacturers, but I do find it a bit unrealistic to expect the opposite from them as what most of the market has been asking for.

Fascinating as hell (and I mean that seriously), but meanwhile the OP with his one post has either solved his own problem or has given up and gone away.

I'm still not sure exactly what his problem is/was, since I haven't run into that particular problem since, I dunno; Win3.1? DOS? Remember 30 meg drives?

I remember single-sided ~160kb disks, and I remember manually deleting DLL and EXE files in windows which I didn't need to save a space by the hundreds of KB when I was dealing with laptop drives in the tens of megabytes.

These days it just depends on how much media and other data you deal with, and how bad the software you deal with is. I have seen software bugs creating runaway temporary and log files running to the 10s of gigabytes.

(I've been guilty of writing software with a bug like that, although it did not get anywhere near customers before I fixed it.)

Disk sizes vary more than ever, too; the oldest useful laptops today, and some of the smallest new PCs/PC-based tablets have SSDs in the low tens of GB. The largest desktop drives are 4TB, and it's not that unusual to have 2-4 of them in a system.

(Let's not talk about servers; a few years ago 100TB directly attached to a single server -- as opposed to as the total capacity of a SAN -- was unthinkable, whereas it's merely a little unusual today.)

Try this on for size. I have been using computers for years (see below) and I just found out yesterday (from you Gfunkdave?) that there exists a Windows utility called Snipping Tool. I paid for this yet never knew I had it. Why is that?

Most of it written so it can be understood solely for members of the IT "priesthood." Many of us wonder for example, when we get the BSOD what the devil that stuff means.

I disagree. Most people have at least a general idea of what the term "business" means as opposed to "personal," or "gaming."

My first machine also was a C64. Were you on Q-Link?

I think my next machine will come from Lenovo. Take a look at their website and price some machines usable in a law practice.

The worthlessness of F1 is among the reasons why IT professionals are able to make a good living.