How can I regain drive space?

[tez]

On XP I have two hard drives - C (original drive) is 20GB with 10.7GB free. The second drive I had fitted has only 295 MB (Yes MB!) on 10GB (actually 8.56GB).
In spite of deleting unwanted photos and music I cannot seem to gain much additional space on D driver and sooner or later I will run into mega-problems with Windows!
Is it true that the file segments are still considered 'occupied' even though the contents may have been deleted?
Any (simple) suggestions as to how to regain space on D would be appreciated. Anything I have installed recently I have installed to the larger drive and I don't have any large games installed either.
Thanks.

[tayspen]

Try CCleaner it removes unneeded files, and if configured correctly cn free up lots of space.

[Lord Soth]

Hi,

Try going to "Documents and Settings\<your user name>\Local Settings\Temp" folder where XP is installed and delete everything from there. What you ask isn't true. If you use NTFS file system you can right click on folders and go to properties, hit "Advanced" Button and check "Compress contents to save disk space" and then after hiting OK it will ask if you want to apply it to sub folders too, just click "OK" and it will compress them for a while; the access time will be degraded because of the on the fly decompression while using but this system is transparent to user. On Folders you don't use a lot you can just right click and select Send To-Comprssed (zipped) folder to ZIP them (this isn't the same thing as before) and delete the original folder to keep the ZIPed one (even beter download WinRAR and RAR anything you don't use.) If you have a CD Writer, buy some CD-RWs and download the free InCD program from Nero, which let you use the CD-RWs just like hard disk or flah drive with no further recording software necessary.

Loren Soth

[tayspen]

Documents and Settings\<your user name>\Local Settings\Temp

CCleaner tacare of that, along with

Internet Explorer
Temporary files, URL history, cookies, Autocomplete form history, index.dat.

Firefox
Temporary files, URL history, cookies, download history.

Windows
Recycle Bin, Recent Documents, Temporary files and Log files.

Registry cleaner
Advanced features to remove unused and old entries, including File Extensions, ActiveX Controls, ClassIDs, ProgIDs, Uninstallers, Shared DLLs, Fonts, Help Files, Application Paths, Icons, Invalid Shortcuts and more... also comes with a comprehensive backup feature.

Third-party applications
Removes temp files and recent file lists (MRUs) from many apps including Opera, Media Player, eMule, Kazaa, Google Toolbar, Netscape, MS Office, Nero, Adobe Acrobat, WinRAR, WinAce, WinZip and many more...

[jingalala]

On XP I have two hard drives - C (original drive) is 20GB with 10.7GB free. The second drive I had fitted has only 295 MB (Yes MB!) on 10GB (actually 8.56GB).
In spite of deleting unwanted photos and music I cannot seem to gain much additional space on D driver and sooner or later I will run into mega-problems with Windows!
Is it true that the file segments are still considered 'occupied' even though the contents may have been deleted?
Any (simple) suggestions as to how to regain space on D would be appreciated. Anything I have installed recently I have installed to the larger drive and I don't have any large games installed either.
Thanks.

If you have deleted stuff, run chkdsk and then the disk defragmenter on the drive. you can Analyze the fragmentation levels first. run a disk cleanup and defrag regularly when there is enough free space on the drive for smooth performance.