Your Hard Drive's Free Space Your hard drive can only hold SO much data. Eventually, if you aren't careful, you'll fill it up, and when you do, your computer will slow to a crawl. How do you know when you've reached the maximum? 1) Double-click on the My Computer icon (on your desktop) 2) You will see a list of drives on your machine. One of them will have a notation of (C:). This is your hard drive. Click on it ONCE to highlight it. 3) Click on the File menu and choose Properties. You'll see a graph similar to Figure 1. Figure 1

In this example, you can see that properties for this hard drive are    SIZE or MAXIMUM CAPACITY is 1.96 GB (gigabytes)    Up 1.50 GB is being used    There is 473 MB (megabytes) to spare. That is not bad. As a rule, you should keep at least 200 MB free on your hard drive. If there's absolutely no way that you can manage that, you should buy a new, larger hard drive. You can now get a several gigabyte drive for about $100 -- it's worth it. Once your hard drive has less than 50 MB of free space, you will start to take a performance hit. Your computer will also crash more often. Make sure you check this graph once very few months. QUESTION     Your FREE SPACE is empty  why be concerned? ANSWER       Your FREE SPACE on Drive C is actually being used! HOW              By Virtual Memory PROOF          Open Control Panel, then open System. Click on the tab for Preferences. Click on the button for Virtual Memory. There will be three boxes colored grey. The top box will show the location and size of your Virtual Memory. How does this size compare to the amount of free space on C? VIRTUAL MEMORY Windows manages your VIRTUAL MEMORY automatically.VIRTUAL MEMORY expands your available RAM by commandeering hard disk space and making it work as pseudo RAM. Physical RAM in your computer is usually 16, 32, 64, 96, 128 or 256 Megabytes. The more RAM you have, the more applications you can open at the same time. True RAM works many times faster than VIRTUAL MEMORY. Once your computer starts using hard disk space for RAM, it slows down considerably. However, sometimes the slower speed is worth it, when compared to the crashes that can happen when you run out of memory. Your reserve of VIRTUAL MEMORY is known as a SWAP FILE. Your SWAP FILE is a hidden file used by Windows to swap or copy data between main memory and your hard disk. When Windows needs data from your hard disk, it exchanges or copies chunks of data in main memory with chunks of data in your SWAP FILE. The default location for your SWAP FILE is Drive C. Windows automatically determines the size and location of your SWAP FILE. You can change both of these settings, but don't bother if your computer is working properly. If you do want to reduce the size of your SWAP FILE, set it between 80MB and 150MB (higher if you use large programs and have less RAM and lower if you have more memory and use fewer programs).