advice about cleaning up my hard drive

[Luddite]

Hi - I need to give my PC a thoroughly good clear out. Rather than laboriously go through every file, I was thinking that it would be better to back everything up to CD and start afresh.

So, my questions are:

1. Is this the best way forward?
2. Can I back my emails up to CD?
3. Are rewritable CDs less stable than non rewritable ones?
4. Any other tips for getting my PC working abit faster?

Cheers

Nick

[george]

A general comment is that you'll be surprised that how little you go back to old stuff really.

I think removing unused programmes helps more than actual files. Apart from larger files obviously.

I only use regular cd's, I think rewritable's do give a higher chance of an error happening. But thats just me. I pay £15 for a hundred cd's so 15p a time won't hurt me. Yet.

I think simply upgrading your memory (£30 for 512mb?) would help for a start. And disabling as much as you can from the Windows Start-up.

Is it just me, or are graphics programmes, msn messenger and Actinic all memory hungry when they're simply ticking over?

Hard drives are cheaper than they've ever been so might be an idea to get a new one (larger) and transferring all your old stuff onto it?

Hopefully you'll find something of use Nick.

[jont]

Old data is a pain - you will probably never need it until 3 days after you delete it

You can backup your emails - the route depends on your email client - if Outlook Express check out http://support.microsoft.com/kb/270670/

In Outlook (not sure about Express) you can use the "large files" list to display emails with huge attachments to make purging easier

RW disks are generally best avoided and are not really needed, especially as George points out that write once CD's are so very cheap. I have had more faileures with RW disks in the past (often when writing them for the 2nd or 3rd time they kill the disk) that I now just whack everything onto bog standard disks and then purge them everyone once in a blue moon.

I am in the process of offloading original image shots (PSD files) onto an external hard drive to free up the internal hard drive - Windows likes a certain amount of slack free space on the hard drive to work efficiently and I am desperately nearing that point.

Adding more RAM is often a great solution - especially if you have several apps open at the same time - 2Gb should be more than enough for most situations with 1Gb being OK for most general users (assuming the processor is up to scratch)