Sometimes when we take some extra time with our computer, we look at our hard drive and we believe that we have plenty of room to store and install a lot of things yet. Suddenly, we see that the space has decreased significantly without an apparent reason. This problem is more common than we think and in many cases it is difficult to know where "extra space" in our hard disk storage is.

If this happens to you, there are some things we can do to try to recover the disk space that we think we are lacking. Many times this occurs because we have installed or saved same files twice, often simply by double copy and paste. Many people think that you can defragment your hard disk to get the required free space, but the truth is it does not really released anything, but reorganizes the information to access data more efficiently.

Disk Cleanup is a free tool for Windows that is responsible for reviewing the hard drive looking for duplicate files for later disposal. The program performs a comprehensive analysis of the system or a directory and detects duplicates based on fast binary comparison algorithm and has internal preview supporting a lot of image, video, music and text file formats, which ensures a successful outcome. The use of Disk Cleanup is quite simple, once downloaded, run the application and it will automatically look for duplicate files and then we can remove them or keep them as interested.

Surely once you've noticed that you had some file, e.g. an Mp3, repeated in various folders on your hard drive or sometimes when you uninstall any software it will not disappear completely, but are remnants of it scattered around the disk. Many of these files are what are called "duplicates", i.e. there are multiple copies of it in your hard disk i.e. in program files and in same time at the temp directory of windows. An interesting opportunity to get rid of these files once and for all is Disk Cleanup.