Now that you know how to work with files, you'll probably soon be acumulating a lot of files. The files will be saved to your hard disk, and there are two very important facts about hard disks you'll need to be aware of.

• Hard disks can get filled with files, which can not only cause you to not be able to save files, but can also make Windows suddenly stop working correctly.
• Hard disks can break.

This tutorial will explain how to keep track of how much space your hard disk has and to make sure that it is managing your files efficiently.

A later tutorial in this series Backing Up Files will cover what to do to avoid losing your files in case your hard disk breaks.

You should always be aware of roughly how full your hard disk is. To find out, start Windows Explorer (right-click on Start and choose Explore ).

In this screenshot Windows Explorer has been started and all nodes under My Computer have been closed. The C: drive has been selected (by clicking on it once).

In the last screenshot no information was showing about the hard disk because there was not enough room in the right pane. In this screenshot:

1. The middle bar has been moved to the left to give more space to the right pane.
2. The information for the hard disk is showing. 7.31 Gigabytes (7.31 billion bytes) are being used on the hard disk for file storage, and 2.04 Gigabytes are free.

You can also see information about your hard disk (or disks, if you have more than one) by right-clicking on the drive in the left pane. This displays a popup menu. (Some of the menu options are your machine may be different depending on what software you have installed).

Clicking on Properties in the popup displays the Disk properties dialog.

This dialog displays information about how full your hard disk is, and other information.

One very important piece of information displayed on this dialog is the file system for the hard disk. The file system is the way that Windows organizes the files on the hard disk. NTFS is a newer and better file system. The older (DOS) file system is called FAT.

Benefits of NTFS:

• More efficient storage. You will be able to store more files with NTFS.
• More options. Most of the rest of the features discussed in this tutorial are not available with the FAT system, and will not appear in the dialog on your computer if you have FAT installed.

Drawbacks:

• If you have any machines networked to your machine, those machines will not be able to read the hard disk if it is NTFS unless they are also running Windows NT or Windows 2000.

Some of the options available with NTFS but not with FAT:

• Automatic file compression (shown in a previous tutorial)
• Automatic file encryption (shown in a previous tutorial)
• File security (file permissions, covered in a later tutorial)

You can convert your file system to NTFS at any time, but you cannot convert it back to FAT (unless you reformat your hard disk, that is, erase everything on it).

Once you convert to NTFS you CANNOT convert back to FAT.

To convert a drive from FAT to NTFS, select Command Prompt from Start > Programs > Accessories.

A Command Prompt window opens. (This is called a console).

Click on the window next to the C:\> (this is a called the Prompt). Enter in the following command:

convert [Drive letter to convert]: /FS:NTFS.

The command to convert the C: drive is shown.

After you enter the command to convert, hit the enter key. The drive will either be converted immediately, or you will get a message saying that the drive cannot be converted immediately, and will be prompted whether you would like to have the drive converted when the system reboots. If you type Y (for Yes), the file system will be converted the next time that the system is rebooted.

Here we have returned to our Disk Properties dialog. Since the file system on this machine is NTFS, some of the options showing will not be visible on your machine if you are using the FAT system.

The are several things you can do to increase free space on your hard disk. You can:

• Delete files (covered in a previous tutorial)
• Convert to NTFS (covered in previous pages of this tutorial)
• Get rid of unnecessary files manually (by deleting them in Windows Explorer, as shown in a previous tutorial)
• Compress files and folders
• Ask Windows to get rid of unnecessary files

The last two items will be covered in the next few pages. Also, subsequent tutorials will cover two more options:

• Archive files  using Winzip
• Move files to another storage device (i.e. back up the files).

As noted in a previous tutorial, you can tell Windows to compress files and folders. You can also tell Windows to compress an entire hard disk by checking the indicated box.

Advantages of having Windows compress your files:

You'll get more disk space. Windows automatically compresses the files when they are stored and decompresses them when they are read.

Disadvantages:

• Disk access will be somewhat slower. This may not matter if you only compress folders where you are storing infrequently accessed documents.
• If you have problems with your disk, it may be harder to recover the files which have been compressed.
• You can't use encryption on compressed files. (Encryption allows you to hide the contents of files so that only you (or a person logged in with your password) can read them.

You can tell Windows to look for files that are good candidates for deletion.

Click on Disk Cleanup.

Windows shows a popup information box as in the screenshot below while it searches for files to delete and other ways to save space on your hard disk.

Once Windows is through checking your hard disk, the Disk Cleanup dialog will be shown.

Selecting an item in the Files to delete: box (1) displays an explanation of the files that will be deleted (2)

Here the item Temporary Internet Files has been selected (1) and an explanation is showing (2).

Click OK to delete all of the checked files. Generally, all items in this window can be safely deleted.

The More Options tab allows you to also choose to remove Windows components and programs in order to free up space.

Clicking on the indicated button will open the Add/Remove programs applet. This applet will be covered in a later tutorial: Adding and Removing Programs .