Someone gave a PC to a friend (Pentium III,850 MHz,128 Mb RAM). I saw that it was rather slow.The 10 Gb hard disk had 3 Gb empty space. We uninstalled and deleted many programs and data that she didn't want to have and then there were 8 Gb free space. After using RegCleaner and defraging the difference in performance was extraordinary!Speed was at least doubled! I don't know if we uninstalled some troublesome program or it's just this analogy of empty to total space that made the difference. Is this your experience? Should one keep his hard disk as empty as possible ?

well, sometimes the disk can get full of unecessary files that could slow down the system. getting rid of them and defrag makse it go alot faster. so its good to do that often so your comp gets optimal speed. or how its called..heh..

On machines that size and speed, a large fragmented file structure and swapfile can cause a lot of slowdown that Defrag can not solve. That is why Defrag programs like Norton's and others sell well. They can defragment the drive in a logical way and defragment the swapfile in the process, two things MaxFrag (ugh.. Defrag) can not do. In the process of cleaning up the drive you may have corrected this and other problems. Most likely you also deleted programs from startup that were slowing down the system, overloading memory, and ran such programs as Ad-Aware. One trick is to Defrag the drive, go in and assign a fixed swapfile, Defrag, then go back and let Windows manage the swapfile. This is the best way to defragment Windows default swapfile if you do not have a better defrag program. Can help system with small memory or too may programs loaded at startup. Good work, hope we have one more happy Windows ME user.

how do I get rid of unwanted files

On my WinME system I have 110GB on three drives. Most of the time all the drives are near capacity, with anywhere from 500MB to 2GB free. Found over time that letting Windows manage the swap file & using the Windows defrager is all you need, used to use Norton's speeddisk but never found any difference. I defrag one drive everyday, but you also need to empty your C:\WINDOWS\TEMP & your C:WINDOW\TEMPORARY INTERNET FILES folder, at least once a week is a good idea. As far as removing unwanted files, use the programs uninstaller or add/remove programs in control panel as for files such as ones you created just right click hold down the shift key & select delete, this bypasses the recycle bin. After uninstalls RegCleaner is one of the best freeware programs to use. Lots of ways to use it so read the instructions & always make a backup. But to completely remove or free up disk space you need a third party program. I use Evidence Eliminator don't confuse it with Norton's cleansweep which doesn't really clean much of anything. Norton only cleans what you've already removed, were Evidence Eliminator cleans all the items that you can't remove yourself.