Welcome to the January (only 24 months, not 12, to the new century!) issue of MicroMetric's TipSheet.
This monthly newsletter is targeted at addressing the needs of our customers.
This month we'll take a break in the series of tips on the Internet, and start a new one on Disk Storage.
As you use Windows 95 and the applications on your system, temporary files (*.TMP) are created for various purposes. During the Windows 95 shut down, most of these files are deleted, but inevitably some get left behind. These stragglers take up disk space and aren't necessary to the proper functioning of your system. Delete them to recover valuable disk space. First locate all the .TMP files on your system: Click Start, select Find, then choose Files or Folders in the popup list; type '*.TMP' on the Named line; select the drive you want to search; and click Find Now. When Find comes back with a list of all the .TMP files, sort them by date (View|Arrange Icons|by Date) and delete all but those dated today.
We receive a lot of requests for tips on freeing up hard disk space. One suggestion is to search your system for *.ZIP and *.AVI files (and other types of video files you might have), and delete the ones you don't need. ZIP files are typically left over from Internet downloads. Once an application is installed, you probably don't need the ZIP file it was packaged in (unless it's something you know you'll need to reinstall). Video files (*.AVI) also take up quite a bit of space. For example, you can regain 7 MB of precious space by deleting the *.AVI files from your c:\Windows\Help folder.
In our last tip, we pointed out that ZIP files and video files (such as *.AVI files) take up loads of hard disk space, so they're a good place to start when trying to recover space. We should mention another culprit--bitmaps (*.BMP). If you do a lot of Paint-ing--for example, you draw your own wallpaper--you need to be especially careful. It's easy to save four or five different versions of the same picture, then forget about them. Search your system for extraneous bitmaps and delete them, or at least save them in a more efficient format, such as *.GIF or *.PCX.
If your system seems to run slower every day, you may have a case of "Trash Overflow"! Especially if you have a large hard drive with a single partition, a significant number of files can reside in the recycle bin. When any system function goes out to read the directories of your hard drive, the number of files in the recycle bin can significantly degrade performance. Check the number of files in the recycle folder, and if more than several hundred, empty this folder.
Want to move Windows 95 to a new hard disk (to make it the boot drive), keeping your current system configuration and data files intact? It can be done, but we should warn you--it isn't the most straightforward operation.
We can't possibly reproduce the entire procedure here (it would span many months of tips!), but we can point you in the right direction. You'll find complete instructions in Microsoft's Knowledge Base, at
http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q166/1/72.asp
Be sure to follow the steps EXACTLY, heeding all of Microsoft's warnings.
A reader offers this tip: "I use Windows Messaging, and my C:\Windows\Mailbox.pst folder recently grew to 33MB. After much fishing, I discovered an option for compacting this folder, accessible through the Control Panel."
Open the Control Panel and double-click the Mail and Fax item. On the Services tab, select Personal Folders and click the Properties button. Click Compact Now and get back some of that wasted disk space! This also will work, with slightly different option selections, for Microsoft Outlook Express.