I recently wanted to free up some hard drive space from my Windows Vista Business laptop, first off I used the newly improved “Disk Cleanup” utility, which can get rid of a lot of unnecessary files like temporary internet, cached office docs and temp files. After disk cleanup, i set on with the standard task of looking at properties of folders to see where the largest files were located and came across a few folders you may not need that can give you quite a few GB free.

If you have purchased a laptop recently then chances are that it’s got either Vista Home or like us at work Vista Business installed, both these operating systems allow an upgrade route to the Vista Ultimate and Microsoft has given the new feature of “Windows Anytime Upgrade” which essentially means you have got the features on your system ready but need to pay for them to be enabled . It’s worth knowing that if you do ever want ot upgrade Microsoft will nicely ship the media to you anyway so you don’t really need these files.

You can locate the files on your main OS hard drive (usually c:). If you goto folder options and enable the “View hidden or System files” you will then see it apprear. Named WAUUPGRD it is between 2-3GB and you can happilly archive this folder off or delete away.

Microsoft Office installation files.

If you have installed Office 2003 or 2007 on your system then you may notice another hidden folder on your computer called MSOCACHE, put simply this is a lot of data from the installation media that speeds up installaitons, repair or additional features. Again if like me you install the applications fully to run from your system then these files are not really required.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/825933

All in all there are loads of things that are default installed on a system that just hog space, cleaning these up can help to speed up your system, help with recovery requirements (as you are not backing up unwanted files) and generally give you more room for your music … play on

Steve Shaw