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Where did my Hard drive space go? -Windows Vista Disk Cleanup

I don’t know about you, but I have a pretty much routine usage of my laptop, which generally is used to mainly read email, compose documents, surf the net, play a few songs, play a few movies on trips, edit a few photos that are stored on an external hard drive, etc. I notice that I keep losing a lot of space on my hard drive for no reason. Checking out the disk properties on my hard drive I noticed I only had 6GB left (granted I could free up 12 GB of photos that I am still culling by copying it to my external drive, but I like to keep things local when I have some free time between meetings, lunch etc.)I wanted to know where some of my storage was going. There are free utilities out there like CCleaner and WinDirStat that tell you exactly where to look, but Vista does have its own built-in cleaner as well called Disk Cleanup.

Launching Disk Cleanup from the Disk Properties(right click on the drive you wish to clean and choose Properties) by clicking on the button or typing Disk Cleanup in the Start/Run bar.

It takes a while depending on your system to scan your files on your drive.

Clicking on the Disk Cleanup button will bring up a laundry list of check boxes with some defaults already checked off and you can choose to check off a few more. This can be done as part of a weekly maintenance routine or it can be scheduled as a task.

It looks like error reporting eat up a huge chunk clocking in at a 1GB.

Clicking on the More Options tab can net even more free space by either removing installd programs and windows features you don’t use.

This is the same utility found under the Control Panel that even shows you how much space your programs are consuming.

Here you can also turn windows features on and off by clicking on the pretty four colored shield. Here you can turn off all IIS services, uninstall games, turn off the Indexing Service, Windows Meeting Space, etc or anything else you may not need or use.