As you install and uninstall numerous programs, add many files and documents, and continually browse the Internet, your hard drive becomes saturated with files. Although some of these may be important files,many are best described as junk or outdated material which are occupying valuable space on your hard drive.

These useless files must be removed in order to free up space for other uses. This will not only make room for some new programs and files but will also improve the performance of your computer.

The latest hard drives nowadays have enormous amounts of storage space. However until only recently, even top of the line computers had only 10-40 GB of hard drive space.

These days, if you purchase a new computer, you will have more than enough storage space for some time to come. If your computer is a bit older, or if you install and uninstall many programs, you should do all possible to limit the quantity of unnecessary files on your hard drive.

The Reasons For Hard Drive Overload

When you uninstall any programs, there will very commonly be a number of orphan files left on the system. Desktop icons, Quick Launch icons, and shortcuts are some of the most noticeable orphan files.

It is also quite likely that more useless files that were not uninstalled have been left behind to take up space. This causes serious cluttering of the hard drive.

Poor programming is a very common reason for these problems. Many software programmers will use install/uninstall programs for example InstallShield that have been properly developed and very well tested. If an incompetent programmer should make some modifications to the installer and thus cause damage to some of the files, or uses some other poor install/uninstall program, the chance of files being left on your system increases greatly.

You can do a search for unnecessary files and invalid registry entries manually. But,deleting a crucial registry entry or file by mistake is quite likely to result in serious problems.

Files may be left on your hard drive intentionally by some programmers. This very often happens when you get a trial version of some software program and the programmer wants to make certain that you cannot reinstall the program and lengthen the trial. Some orphan files, you will find, are just settings used to configure a program when you upgrade it to a newer version.

Improper computer shutdown or crashes during an install/uninstall process are another common cause of orphan files being left behind.

The Prevention and Removal Of Unnecessary Files

It is definitely not possible to prevent all cases of orphan files being left behind on your hard drive. You can however curtail the problem to some extent by taking proper precautions.

1. Always use the Add/Remove Programs feature of the Windows operating system. First you should click on Start->Control Panel then double click on->Add/Remove Programs. Next you can select the program to be uninstalled from the list displayed and finally click on Remove. Follow the instructions onscreen to finish the uninstall.

2. Some programs are not on the Add/Remove programs list. To uninstall these, Click on Start and view the program list. Then you should click on the submenu of the program to be uninstalled. A shortcut, for example Uninstall Your Program, may be found in the list sometimes. Click on this and uninstall the program.

If the uninstall shortcut is not to be seen in the Start menu, you can perform a search for the folder where the program files are kept. Look in that folder for the uninstall file and double click on it to begin uninstalling the program.

3. If your PC crashes or is improperly shut down during a program uninstall, you should reinstall the program immediately and start the uninstall process once again.

Some uninstall software can be purchased which is efficient, and renders it simple to keep your computer free of invalid registry entries and unwanted files.

We also strongly recommend downloading a registry cleaner from the internet. You should use this regularly to scan the registry and remove all invalid and obsolete entries.

Our tests of the popular registry cleaners found one which was clearly better than the others. This tool found and deleted up to 50% more registry problems than some of the other registry cleaners did. This is the program we have installed on our own computers to keep them running smoothly and at top speed.