A Guide to Reducing Hard Drive Clutter Introduction Ciaran Kelly
Over time, clutter begins to build up on your hard drive. Applications, lost DLL files, as well as all manner of information files such as .GIF and .TXT.
What follows is a series of essential techniques that you should use to manage your hard drive. Most of these techniques are born out of necessity, as most users becoming sick and tired of running out of space especially as they spend a large amount of time installing games (some of these are huge), utilities and applications and then deleting them off again.
It is very soon discovered that Windows programs in particular left bits of themselves all over a small hard drive. This was inherent even in the days of Windows 3.11 when all the 16 bit applications were extremely ill mannered and offered no nice, cute uninstall features and scattered themselves all over precious bytes of hard disk space.
Most 'anorak' type people would be well aware of this errant behaviour and would have had their own strategies for dealing with such mischievous programs. However all of this is news to most people, so they ploughed ahead regardless, watching and wondering why they could no longer install the latest, greatest game as their machine simply did not want to know about it. Most users then made the move to Windows 95 and were altogether flabbergasted at how slow and muddy it was. It had made some user's systems totally unusable and those users were very disappointed with its performance.
While their hardware should have been enough according to the blurb they couldn’t understand what the problem was. Of course it was fairly obvious really, it was absolutely choked with 16 bit applications, had virtually no leeway as regards the dynamic W95 swap file and was basically struggling to keep it’s head above water. Therefore an alternate strategy was required. The following is personal account of what I did to resolve Windows 95's problems. It serves as a good guide for other users that feel the same way about Windows 95's sluggish performance at times.
