wipping my hard drive clean?
- Thread starter DMGrier
- Start date
For one if you are going by the 750gb shown in your sig the way drives are sold you can expect a smaller amount before the OS is even installed just from seeing what is available once partitioned and formatted. Once Windows is on fresh you would see some 692gb rather then the advertised 750gb since Windows uses a different method for measuring drive space. For the Dell that would be about 114gb for the 120gb HD there.
Drives are sold using the decimal unit of measure while Windows and other OSs typically use the binary type. Then you have to allow for the space taken up by the installation plus space reserved for virtual memory. That's referred to as the paging file where data is stored temporarily on the drive in order to supliment the amount of physical memory installed.
For cleaning up any garbage left on the drive by installers and uninstallers some free tools like the Windows cleanup utility and a popular freeware called CCleaner performs the task of locating and removing useless and now empty temp folders left behind. The "crap cleaner" as it is also nicknamed is a free drive cleanup tool found at http://www.ccleaner.com/
Drives are sold using the decimal unit of measure while Windows and other OSs typically use the binary type. Then you have to allow for the space taken up by the installation plus space reserved for virtual memory. That's referred to as the paging file where data is stored temporarily on the drive in order to supliment the amount of physical memory installed.
For cleaning up any garbage left on the drive by installers and uninstallers some free tools like the Windows cleanup utility and a popular freeware called CCleaner performs the task of locating and removing useless and now empty temp folders left behind. The "crap cleaner" as it is also nicknamed is a free drive cleanup tool found at http://www.ccleaner.com/
On a prebuild like either in your sig you also have to include the hidden recovery information stored in the invisible partition. The tools mentioned however are seeing non system related garbage cleaned off of the drive in order to free up several hundred megs taken up by things like empty folders you won't be using at any time. 
One thing to mention about CCleaner however is to remember to uncheck everything in the IE history if you save things like login information and sites visited since that will clear out all offline content. The other is the very limited scimpy registry cleaner tossed into the mix.
A good freeware with a good track record so far is found at http://www.eusing.com/free_registry_cleaner/registry_cleaner.htm
The Eusing cleaner there is a fully automatic one run scan of the system registry where you simply click the repair option once the scan is complete in order now useless entries left behind by uninstallers cleared out. I've run that on both XP and Vista alike here without one issue coming up.
One thing to mention about CCleaner however is to remember to uncheck everything in the IE history if you save things like login information and sites visited since that will clear out all offline content. The other is the very limited scimpy registry cleaner tossed into the mix.
A good freeware with a good track record so far is found at http://www.eusing.com/free_registry_cleaner/registry_cleaner.htm
The Eusing cleaner there is a fully automatic one run scan of the system registry where you simply click the repair option once the scan is complete in order now useless entries left behind by uninstallers cleared out. I've run that on both XP and Vista alike here without one issue coming up.