If the performance of your Windows computer has deteriorated, take the following steps to improve the situation.
Check to see if your hard drive is too full.
Open My Computer
Right click on your hard drive
Click Properties
You should see a window similar to the example on the right
You should have at LEAST 250 megabytes of free space available on the C: drive
If you have less than 250 megabytes, please continue reading as Section 3 has tips for reclaiming wasted space
Make note of the File System that you are using
FAT is older, and less secure than NTFS
You should convert your drive to NTFS by typing the following in a command prompt: convert /fs:NTFS c: Replace C: with the drive that needs to be converted
The conversion will take place when you next reboot your computer
Repeat the steps in Section 1 and you should see an increase in free space
Reclaiming wasted space
The easiest method and first step to reclaiming wasted space is simply
to press the Disk Cleanup button on the property page of your hard drive
This will launch the Disk Cleanup utility which will automatically scan
temporary files and other miscellaneous clutter
Once this scan is complete, you will be prompted to mark folders for deletion
While generally safe, it is important that you ensure that your data is not being marked for deletion!
Check your Mozilla Firefox cache to see if there is excess space being taken up
Open Firefox and in the address bar type about:cache
This will bring you to a cache summary page that gives you information about the caches Firefox is using
In the bottom half of the summary, examine the Storage in use entry to determine how much disk space
Firefox is using
Firefox will, by default, use a maximum of 50MB for its cache
Once the hard drive has been cleaned out a bit, run Disk Defragmenter
In the Property page for your hard drive (like the screen above), click the Tools tab at the top
In the screen that follows, click the Defragment Now button
In the Disk Defragmenter window that opened, click the Defragment button
Defragmenting a hard drive can take a good deal of time depending on size of the hard drive and
how organized the hard drive is
It is probably a good idea to defragment the hard drive at a time when you will not be using the computer
If you follow all these steps and still don’t have adequate hard
drive space available, or your computer is still running too slowly, submit a problem report to the computer center from the
web page http://cc.jlab.org/helpdesk/. Always
remember that we are able to offer more specific advice when provided with more
detailed information.
