No matter how large your hard drive, it can never be large enough. Time and the Internet take their toll on your available hard disk space and sooner or later you're going to run short of disk space. The Windows XP Disk Cleanup utility can keep your disk lean and mean and bring back some of that missing disk space. Try it out! Here's how:

1. Click Start and then click the Run command. In the Run dialog box, type cleanmgr in the Open text box and click OK. You can also access the Disk Cleanup tool from the Accessories menu, but using the Run command is faster.
2. In the Select Drive dialog box, select the drive you want to clean up and click OK.
3. Click on the Disk Cleanup tab. You'll notice there are a bunch of options for files that you can automatically remove or compress. Click on each of these options and read the description of each one. Put a checkmark in each of the options and click OK.
4. A dialog box appears asking if you are sure you want to perform the disk cleanup. Click OK.
5. A progress bar appears that shows you how far the Disk Cleanup has progressed. The most time consuming process is compressing older files. Note that compressing does not delete the files, it just causes them to take up less disk space.

When the cleanup is done, the application just disappears. You should have quite a bit more disk space available after running this application the first time.