I ran low on disk space.

In the past I’ve found treesize utility quite handy for figuring out where space is being used up. Windows should have something like this built-in surely? Anyway I set that scanning my whole disk (takes several hours) But no real disk space revelations this time actually. I just seem to be using up a lot space with photos and mp3s, but not really wanting to delete them.

Then there’s the wonderful windows “Disk Cleanup” tool. This is some kind of usability masterstroke. With the introduction of XP/2000, at about the same time they figured out that yes you do want to be able to press ctrl+F to find things in notepad, and to be able to open JPEGs in paint. Yes, around about then, some genius also figured out that you might actually want to be able to easily flush away all the temporary crap from your hard disk. It even prompts you to run it, if you get really low on space. So somebody’s really thought about the problem. Well done microsoft. Except….

It doesn’t work! I ran it a couple of weeks ago, without much luck, and soldiered on with only a few hundred megabytes free.

Today I’ve just discovered 2.6 gigs of wasted space mysteriously held hostage by windows.

No. The way to truly cleanup unneeded temporary files, is to download and run a little utility written by ….some random bloke. CleanUp!

Do ‘Options’ and untick everything, except ‘Fully Erase Files (wipe clean)’ which should be ticked. It runs very slowly for some reason, but it has spent the past 6 hours deleting ‘c:\Recycler’ directory files which looks like a copy of my complete photo collection twice over, or something ridiculous.

I can only imagine that it’s something to do with recycle bin space for other user profiles, but I thought I’d been logging on as the same user the whole time, so why Microsoft’s built-in “Disk Cleanup” tool doesn’t free up this space is mystery to me.