I'm betting that you have more than a few older desktop computers in your organization. Hopefully they might even be running Windows 7 now. I'm also betting that you've run into problems because the computer is running out of disk space and you haven't been able to properly remedy the situation. What you need is a little breathing room, something to free up some disk space to keep the end user in business.

One option that can free up a big chunk of space is to relocate the Windows paging or swap file. If the computer is fortunate enough to have a second partition or if you can temporarily attach an external drive, configure the other drive to hold the swap file and set the current drive to none as shown in Figure 1.

You might get a warning about not having a swap file but as long as you've set one, you should be fine. Reboot and you should get some immediate relief. But if that still isn't enough, then you'll need to check out the accompanying article, 10 Tips for Cleaning Up a Hard Drive, to discover more techniques and tools for putting a drive on a crash diet. Some things can be done through the GUI and others through the command line. The article includes PowerShell scripts you can download. In fact, you can see one of them in action in the accompanying video, Methods for Clearing Space on a Hard Drive.

Unless you've just invested in brand new machines with terabyte drives, I expect you'll run into disk space issues sooner rather than later. In fact, you might want to start slimming some drives now before things get out of hand. Let me show you how.