Hard Drive Partitioning – Free

If you’ve recently bought a new Windows 7 computer, you’ve probably got a 300+ GB drive with your operating system, programs and all the pictures, text and video you transferred over to the new computer. What I like to do is to divide the  hard drive into two partitions – one for the operating system and one for the data (pictures, video, graphics test)

The advantage to this system is that you can frequently and easily backup your C: Operating System to an external drive so that if your computer ever gets a virus/malware/ it’s easy to restore that partition without affecting your data. I also backup before I install a new program so that if I have a problem or the program doesn’t uninstall properly I can easily restore my latest backup.

While I’ve used Partition Magic in the past, there’s a new free program which has some great reviews.
Partition Wizard Free Home Edition

Here’s a good review of the program.

What’s Taking Up Most of the Space On Your Hard Drive?

The general rule of computing is that no matter how large your hard drive is, it will eventually fill up and tell you that it’s out of space. While you can certainly add a new larger hard drive, another option might be cleaning up your old hard drive and get rid of all those giganto files. The problem is how do you “easily” find those large files and folders?

WinDirStat.info is one highly recommended program to do just that.
It may take a while to scan your drives, but when you check back, it will give you a visual picture of what is taking up all that space. Then you can move or delete those files and folders to give yourself more breathing room.