• Go to the start button, then click on "find," then "folders or files."
• In the box that pops up, put the following in the skinny area that is entitled named: *.tmp (that is: astrix, dot, tmp) .
• Click on "find now"
• When it is done looking, go to edit, and choose "select all" then tap your delete button on your keyboard (or go to "file" and "delete")
• The next prompt will ask you if you are sure you want to delete- yes you are.

2) Delete CHK files: follow all of the above directions, but substitute "chk" for "tmp"

3) More temporary files -follow the above directions but instead of "*.tmp" put ~*.* (that is: tilde, astrix, dot, astrix).

4) Empty your cache: depending on your browser and the version of it (Netscape or Internet explorer) you will have to hunt a little, but this option is generally found under preferences or options and is labeled "cache" You should empty both memory and disk cache (in Netscape 4.0 and up this is found under "edit" Preferences" the click the little "plus" sign by advanced and select cache and to the right you will see two button to clear the caches)

5) Empty your recycle bin! Right click and select "empty recycle bin" This permanently deletes things that you have thrown away. Until you do this step, you have not gained any disk space even though you threw things "away." I mention this because I was helping someone who had a completely full hard drive and when I clicked on "empty recycle bin" it told me it had more than 11,000 (yep, eleven thousand) items to delete. It emptied for 10 minutes!! We recovered quite a bit of space!

These things will tidy up and get rid of the "trash" on your hard drive.
To finish the job there are a couple more things to do:

6) Run SCAN DISK and DEFRAG:

• Open "my computer" .
• RIGHT click on the "c" drive go to the bottom of the list that pops up and select "properties."
• Click on the tab that says "tools."
• Click on the button for scan disk (make sure the box that says "automatically fix errors" is checked)
• Unless you have a lot of time, I would recommend you select "standard" instead of "thorough."
• When that is done and lets you select close,  go down the tool box and select "defrag."
• It may give you the message that it doesn't need to be defragged--ignore this and click on "start".
• If you have a very large hard drive or one that is severely defragmented, it will take a while to run through the defragmenting program.

Most of these things should be done every 2 weeks (or at least once a month) The cache, though, should be cleared more frequently--every couple of days or even every day if you spend a lot of time surfing.

The quotation marks in this explanation are for emphasis only- do not include them as part of any command.