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where and how do i clean out my hard drive?

There are several levels of what you just said. You can clean out an attic, or you can burn the house down and rebuild the place. We are going to get the tourch and I will tell you how. Grab your windows installation CD (I hope it is windows XP) and pop it into the CD tray, reboot your PC and during the boot process a message will be displayed saying press any key to boot from CD... , press any key and then let your PC go through the simple steps. If the option did not display you will need to go into your BIOS and change the boot order if this is the case, ask how if you need to . Delete any partitions, and the do a full format using NTFS. After that just follow the easy to follow directions and you will be on your way. Keep in mind, EVERYTHING will be erased from your hard drive, so if you have pictures, bookmarks, files or anything else of the sort you need to keep, I suggest burning them onto a CD. Good luck!

If you only want to clean up and not entirely remove everything, you can manually go through and uninstall any programs you do not use often, and especially ones you still have the installers or disks for. Get a registry cleaner, RegClean is my personal favorite, and clean that up. Defragment your hard drive using the windows defragmenter tool, and finally go through your folders and delete old files that are no longer useful. Also, CleanUp! is a fantastic tool to free up more space, first time running it on my computer I got 3GB of space back.