Disk Cleanup is used to delete files
and objects from your disk to clear additional free space when your
disk gets full. It will also make your drive perform a little faster.
All disks suffer errors and corruptions over
the course of their lifetimes. Indeed, optical disks are so large and
their written areas so small that they can be damaged by all sorts of
things: the magnetic head coming too close to the surface of the
optical platter, a speck of dust, the stray cosmic ray, you name it.
Disk drives are designed to find and mark off damaged areas and to find
and fix soft errors. (SSDs are memory chips and don’t suffer from this
defect.)
The primary tool in Windows 8 that performs this magic is called Check Disk (chkdsk.exe),
and in Windows 8 this utility’s operational mode has changed so that it
is running in the background fixing errors as it detects them. This
will greatly reduce the time you need to spend fixing your disks. When
Check Disk detects an error, it will post a “Scan drive for errors”
message in the Action center. You can run Check Disk on all attached
drives while your system runs, but to run it on the system disk you
have to reboot your system and wait for the process to complete.
To run Disk Cleanup
1. Click the Disk Cleanup button on the General tab of a disk drive’s Properties dialog box .
2. When the Disk Cleanup dialog box appears, select the files you want to remove and click OK.
Use Disk Cleanup to free up additional space on your drive.
3. Confirm your action in the alert box.
To run Check Disk
1. Click the Tools tab in the disk drive’s Properties dialog box, then tap or click the Check button in the Error Checking section.
The Tools tab of a disk drive’s Properties dialog box
2. The Error Checking dialog box appears . Select Scan And Repair Drive.
The Error Checking dialog box
If this is the boot drive (system
disk), you will be asked to reboot your system and the Check Disk
utility will run prior to startup.
Tip
Hard disk errors can be transient
and sometimes aren’t detected immediately by Windows 8’s background
scanning. If your computer freezes or reboots and you can’t track down
a software bug, try running Check Disk
