How Can I Free-Up More Hard Drive Space?

Disk space is finite resource that must be used wisely. The more cluttered your hard drive is, the slower your computer will run. While it might seem more economical to save everything on your computer hard drive, doing so is risky because you could lose everything if your computer crashes or your laptop gets damaged.

With a few simple adjustments to your computer habits, you can free-up tons of hard drive space and create secure backups of all your important files. Follow these tips to save computer storage space.

Open a Gmail account and use the Google Docs feature to make back-up copies of text documents. A Gmail account has several gigas of storage space, and since it's online, there are no external storage devices to worry about. You can also save text documents in an email draft.

After backing-up your text documents, reformat them into smaller files if possible. For example, you can export Word documents to Notepad, and convert the .doc files into .txt files, which are more compact. You will lose some formatting, but special characters will be preserved.

Next, copy all of your image files to an external storage device, such as a USB memory, flash drive, or CDs. Take non-essential photos and images off of your hard drive to save disk space.

Another space saving technique is to convert images files to smaller formats, such as jpg or jpeg. This may cut down file sizes by about 60%-80%.

Delete program files for programs you never use, or transfer them to CDs if you still want to keep them. These may be old games, demos, or old programs you wrote.

Empty the recycle bin, and consider running the disk defragmenting program. These steps will free up more disk space on your computer without any major overhauls. Depending on how many files you have, you can complete this within 2 to 3 hours.

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