How to clean Hard Disk
Usually large quantity of data accumulates on the hard disk over time. These data may be digital photos, videos and MP3 songs and lots of other files with mysterious file names and extensions. Generally these are leftovers of old programs that were improperly uninstalled, temporary internet files from surfing session, and left over for music or videos editing sessions. All this not only devours lots of valuable storage space, but also causes system backups or defragmenting to take forever. So you must periodically do some spring cleaning. This would include inspection of many different folders and looking for particular files that are not needed. Of course, it is not an easy task doing this manually. The best known remedy to this is to use tools like HDCleaner or CCleaner (Crap Cleaner).
HDCleaner thoroughly searches the hard disk for potential memory hoggers and DLL files, duplicates as well known links, and then eliminates these. I have used this tool and it does its job fairly well.
To use HDCleaner, select ‘Clean hard drive | Go to’. Select all drives first within ‘Remove unnecessary files’ and confirm the same with ‘Search hard disk’. The tool tells you about all the useless files. It displays all files that are can be removed in the next window. You can delete those files and empty the Recycle bin. Though searching for the duplicates can be time consuming, but you can search selectively under ‘Options’. For instance, you can choose to search for duplicates by instructing HDCleaner to compare only the names or sizes of files. Once you have deleted the dispensable DLL files and incoherent links, the JKDefrag tool comes into play (http://www.emro.nl/freeware). This tool defragments your hard disk and rearranges the data on it.
My favourite utilities for drive maintenance are CCleaner and Diskeeper. I run the former once a week and Diskeeper is set on automatic mode. It defrags in real time, even if the drive space is below 15%. Very useful.