to free up disk space,outlook express can compact messages?

The compacting of messages is a process that purge your inbox of deleted messages. Deleted messages are only marked as deleted, the actual space used is only cleared by compacting.

As you NEVER used outlook or outlook express, initiating that process is totaly useless, as there is nothing to compact.

You are geting that message because you are runing low on disk space and the cleanup wisard is starting automaticaly.

Open the explorer, right-click on your C: drive and sellect "Properties".
This will tels you how much space is used and free on the drive. It will also give you a percentage of used space. Try to keep that value larger than about 15%.

If you have more than one drive:
(if not, drives are prety inexpensive, think about installing one or two)
In the control pannel, open the "System" applet. Sellect the "Advanced" tab. Click the "Parameters" button of the performance section. Find the "Virtual memory" section and click the "Modify" button.
Sellect ANY drive other than the one where Windows is intalled. Click "Personalised size" and enter the initial size of about 1.5 times your installed RAM. Set "maximum size" to the same value.
Sellect the Windows' drive and sellect "No file"
If you have more than 2 drives, spread your page file between all of them.
**** This is best done on EMPTY drive(s). ****
Click OK when done.
This will liberate some space on the C: drive AND improve your performances :)


MOVE your media files to that other drive(s). Any music and videos are to be moved firts. Next are your images and pictures, then your various documents.

Take a look at your installed programms. Uninstall those that you no longer need/use.

In the explorer, open your Windows folder. DELETE the files and folders whose names start and end with a "$" sign older than 3 months. Those are the uninstalls for the Microsoft updates and security patches. Those older than 3 months are no longer needed. (those younger than that are very rarely needed)
In "C:\WINDOWS\$hf_mig$", delete files older than 3 months.

If you NEVER use hybernate, DISABLE it totaly.

Flush your recycle bin.

This can easily free up several GIGS of disk space.

Electro
July 2011