Need to take out the trash.

[scatman6bass69]

Hi everyone,

I'm helping a friend to improve the performance of an old Dell computer with my very limited knowledge. I've downloaded some ant-spyware stuff(Spybot, AdAware and SpywareBlaster). This has helped to some degree, but upon right clicking on the C drive icon in My Computer and clicking on Properties I've found that the computer only has about 1.8 GB of RAM remaining of a possible 18 GB.

This computer has had multiple owners and surely a lot of the stuff that's using all this RAM is expendable. Is there anything I can do to safely remove the garbage from C drive? I've already run disk clean-up and defragged.

The file system is FAT32 and the OS is Win2K.


Thanks.

[MaDef]

Do you mean 1.8 gigabytes out of 18 on the harddrive?
Remove unwanted programs via the control panel. or if you have the win2k install cd, just reformat and reinstall the os (that would be the better option since the machine has had multiple owners). You should also be able to delete any cache files, empty any temp folders, remove unused user profiles, etc.

[scatman6bass69]

Hi, MaDef,

Do you mean 1.8 gigabytes out of 18 on the harddrive?

Yeah, that's what I meant. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction. I found lots of old, unused, and obsolete stuff in different parts of the start menu, and am slowly chipping away at the junk(I'm up to about 3 gigs of free space now, and I just found a bunch of old video that'll probably free up a bunch of space when it's gone.)

Thanks again.

Scatman

[Landon]

Videos and MP3 files take up gigs upon gigs of space, there if often a lot of left over garbage in the C:\Windows\Temp\ directory that can usually be safely deleted as well.

[bAdWaYz]

If you can backup any data you want to save then just clean install an Os that is the route I'd go. If not there has been some good advice offered already. You may want to get your hands on a copy of ccleaner its free and does a nice job.