Easy ways to recover up to gigabytes of wasted space!
Target The Moldy Oldies
When you're done with the tmp and bak files, look for files that you haven't accessed in a long time: Any file you haven't touched in, say, a year or more, is a likely candidate for offline archiving (on floppies, CD, tape, or whatever) or deletion. Here's how to find 'em:
Go back to the Find dialog's "named" box, type "*.*" (but omit the quotes). Make sure the "Look in" pull-down list is still set to C:\ or "Local hard drives," and that "Include subfolders" is still enabled. Now click the Date tab.
Click "Find All files" and use the pull-down list to select "Accessed." Use the "between" function to pick starting and ending dates from some time ago. For example, if you're reading this in August 2000, you might pick a start date of five years ago (August 1995) and an end date of one year ago (August 1999). Then click "Find Now" and Find will show you a list of all files last accessed in whatever date range you specify.
Your search may turn up more files than "Find" can handle. If that happens, narrow your search with an even-older date range or by only looking for specific types of files. For example, you might return to the "named" box and type in common data-file types, such as *.doc, *.txt, *.rtf, *.xls, *.ppt and so on. When you pare the list to a manageable size, weed through it, deleting or archiving old, rarely used files
Kill The Pigs
When that's done, use Find to identify (and delete) the fattest, most-piggish, most-space-hogging files on your system. Go back to the Find dialog's "named" box, type "*.*" (but omit the quotes). Make sure the "Look in" pull-down list is still set to C:\ or "Local hard drives," and that "Include subfolders" is still enabled. Now click the Advanced tab. You can do a narrow search of specific file types (in the "of type" pulldown) or let Find search for the default of "all files and folders."
The "Size is" option has two parts. In the left pulldown, select "at least," and in the right pulldown, select a large size -- say, 10MB to start. (Note that the file size must be entered in KB; 1 MB is 1000 KB; 10 megabytes is 10000 KB; and so on.) Click "Find Now" and see what turns up. If there are too many or two few files to make a useful list, adjust the file size down or up as needed until you've found a reasonable number of large files.
You'll probably want to leave program files, dlls, backup files (not *.BAK files, but the files created by hard-drive backup programs), and the like alone. But if you find huge graphics, video files, or any large data file, you may wish to archive it, compress it (such as with WinZip), or if it's not important, delete it.
Ka-Ching!
You're done, and you've probably gained enough space on your hard drive to be the equivalent of what constituted an entire new hard drive just a few years ago -- but unlike those physical drives, you've gained all that space on your current drive, and for free!
But don't guess at the results of your work: Click My Computer/C:/Properties. Subtract the amount of "free space" shown in the dialog from the amount you got before, and you'll know, precisely, how much space you've gained.