Please help me my hard drive is full

Hi everyone I have a problem my hard drive is completly full. Being a big PC gamer I am in need to free up some hard drive space. Alot of new games are being released including some mods for my game battlefield 2 which I have been waiting for along time to be released.

I thought I just had alot of carp** left on my pc from all the movies I downloaded and sites Ive visited so I cleaned it with a program I got from this website a year ago called "clean up". Unfortunitly this program only managed to free only a few space.

Here is a picture of how much space I had before using clean up.

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here is after

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here is the list of programs I have installed i don't really want to uninstall these

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is there any way to free up hard drive space what does the "disk clean up" do?
There was some compressed files that if it should be deleted but i dont know if they are importent or not.

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i want to install some battlefield 2 and halflife 2 mods but it says not enough hard drive space

Bottom Line — It seriously looks like it's time to add a second Hard Drive and move many of your games and applications out of your C:\ drive and onto your new second drive.

The Disk CleanUp utility feature - Compress Old Files, is safe and may save you some room, even as much as one gigabit, but that really won't completely solve your Full Hard Drive problem. "Compress Old Files" will notice any applications you haven't used in the past 50 days (or some other arbitrary number of unused days) When you return to use applications that have been compressed, your XP system will automatically Uncompress them before use. This "uncompress" procedure will take a small amount of time, and you may experience "lag" while the computer is uncompressing. This is usually not a problem, but if you are an agressive "gamer" you may be sensitive to any "lag" whenever and however it appears.

CleanUp! 4.0 or 4.5 from www.stevengould.org is a great program. That's probably the utility that you mention that you used. It does pretty much the same function as the XP Disk CleanUp, but I think it does a much better job. (notice that the XP Disk CleanUp window already shows 0kb to Temp and Recycle Bin.

You can retrieve even more Disk space by using the "More Options" tab in XP's Disk CleanUp.
Press the More Options tab and you will get options to remove old Restore Points (eventualy System Restore can consume a Huge amount of space saving mostly uselesss old system configuration information that you'll never use) I think the default setting is 12%. That would mean about 10 gigabits on an 80gig hard drive. That's some serious space. Users generally only need the most recent few Restore Points and can save a ton of Hard Drive space in this feature.

Again, under "More Options" you have the alternative of removing XP system functions that you don't use. Unless you actually know that a feature is unused - and un-needed by XP - leave it alone.

Never turn off System Restore Points if your machine is infected with spyware or virus, until you've completely cleaned the infection. (Having even an infected Restore Point, is better than No Restore Point at all.)

Clear out your Restore Points "manually" as follows:

System Restore: turning it off and back on

On the Desktop, right-click My Computer.
Click Properties.
Click the System Restore tab.
Place a Check in - Turn off System Restore.
Click Apply, and then click OK.

Now Turn your System Restore back on:

Restart your computer.

On the Desktop, right-click My Computer.
Click Properties.
Click the System Restore tab.
Remove the Check mark from - Turn Off System Restore.
Click Apply, and then click OK.

While in your System Restore, you could consider adjusting the default setting downward from 12% to 6% or even 3%. Those settings will still give you room for several Restore Points, while not consuming the extra 5gigs or more of your Hard Drive.

Downloaded Program Files in C:\Windows\Downloaded Program Files —
These are not "installed" applications, but rather the installation routines themselves.
You can generally, safely delete these files.
Click on each one to "see what it is". And make a decision about whether or not you want to install them.

Recycler - When you delete a file, it goes to the Recycle Bin. When you Empty Recycle Bin, XP pushes the file information to Recycler. Only the computer spirits know why you would want to save stuff that you already deleted twice. But XP has these redundant safeguard to prevent you from losing files that you might have deleted by accident. If your machine has been running just fine for a week or so after deleting a file to the Recycle Bin, and then to the Recycler……. you can probably dump them for good.
Select the entire file/s in Recycler and delete it/them

Back to my original Bottom Line……… Going through the steps I have listed above, will probably gain you up to 10gigs at most. Windows XP and your "gaming applications" needs "Free Space" when activated during system procedures and game playing. The general "Rule of Thumb" is to keep AT LEAST 25% free space on a Hard Drive for good performance.

Therefore, please consider getting a second Hard Drive and moving your gaming applications over to it.
Added Benefit - With more "Free Space" your XP and gaming applications will have more room to operate and you will probably notice an increase in Performance.

Best Regards

Thank you for your help.

I tried all those things you said first I did clean up it saved about 500+ mb then I did the downloaded files, then the system restore. But the last thing at the "recyler" part I was unable to delete these files I noticed it had over 3.43 GB it would not let me delete them cause it says "hidden". I tried to delete the whole folder but it did not do anything. these 3.40 gigs are most likely useless space so if possible i want to get rid of them.

So is there any way to get rid of all this deleted carp** permently?

I just deleted it but now it went back to the recycle bin and I cant see anything in the bin but it says its full and it wont let me empty it?

here is the folder

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Well the good news is I got back about 6 or 7 gigs of space this should be enough room to install about 3-5 new mods/games. My b-day is this June so this will probbely be enough space till i can buy another hard drive for my b-day I am gonna go to comp-USA and buy a new ge-force card, new processor, more ram, and a new mother board.

here is a pic of what saved.

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also on a side note how do we get our accounts back on this forum I had an old account that i made on this forum about over a year ago when I came here for help I tried to log on it but it would not let me on any of the forum it said "access denied" or something like that. So I made this new account.

Good Work, Cade Foster, Recycler can be stubborn. It is a "hidden file". You can set your folder options to "show hidden and system files" during your cleanup process, but then set it back to hide those folders - important! You may benefit from re-booting into SAFE Mode to run your cleanup. Did you adjust the amount of space allocated for System Restore? This will save you more gigs. The space for System Restore remains Empty until used by System Restore, but may not be available for anything else in the meantime, so reduce the settings to 6% or 3% to recover useful space. 5.8gigs isn't much space in comparison to your total hard drive size. (About 12%) So running your XP system plus gaming doesn't allow much wiggle room for the applications as they run. You "may" improve your systems performance remarkably if you run Scan Disk followed by Disk Defrag. Disk Defrag will at least repack your applications so that they will be "contiguous" (close together) which will reduce the read-write-read cycles that your hard drive goes through when executing applications. When applications files are scattered across the hard drive, the hard drive may have to work dozens and even hundreds of times harder, thereby reducing its speed and your machine's overall performance. When you Defrag…….. Run the Defrag (3) times in a row. That may seem awkward or a waste of time, but the (3) times routine gives Defrag the opportunity to really neat things up… (recommended) As to your login here at TC…… That's really a matter for an Admin or Mod to answer, but I'm guessing that you have not used the "exact" spelling of your old username, or the exact password. Your old account is probably still there. Notice that some members joined two or three years ago and still use there account, even if they haven't posted for a year or more. Since you have a new account, you may be just as well off to continue using it. Write the username and password down on a piece of paper that you will still be able to gain access to in another year or two in case this comes up again for you. Get that new Hard Drive as a first priority. You'll be amazed at the improvements you'll experience when you give your system and applications to do their job with sufficient room to manuever! In the meantime, though you've said you don't want to do it, I have a hard time imagining that you actually run all the gaming that you have installed. Pick the few games that you haven't run for a few months and won't likely use in the near future and consider uninstalling them. You can put them back when you have more Free Space. Best Regards