My Vista (un-)powered laptop is playing up, presumably because the hard-drive is apparently chocka, only a couple of gb left out of 70 or so.
But I can’t figure out what’s using the space. There’s 13Gb of photos, about 6Gb of program files and 1Gb in “My documents” of general stuff.
So what’s the best way of giving the hard-drive a clean, other than reinstalling Windows?
It has a recovery partition, so I presume I could just do it from there?

If you don’t care about what you currently have on you machine or have backed it up and have the disks/files to reinstall anything that you have added since you got it then using the recovery partition to put your machine back to the factory state is an awesome idea, it really works

If you just want to clean out the crap and free up some space the CCleaner works well

If you want to try and see what is using up the space then try WinDirStat

Enjoy

Define “playing up.”

Vista disk space cleanup:
Right-click on your C: drive in My Computer, go to Properties, then click “disk cleanup” on there. This will clean up basic stuff, and if you’ve installed a service pack then you can delete the rollback files from here too (I can’t remember the exact wording it uses, sorry).

Download and run TFC.

Use TreeSize Free to see what else is taking up space.

Do *not* delete system files manually from inside C:\windows unless you know what you’re doing. Vista is not the same as XP.

cheers.
ran the “disk cleanup” and discovered I had 15Gb on Windows error files… go figure.
By playing up, I mean often runs slow and frequently crashes out to the blue screen.
I do have everything backed up on my NAS, so I think its time to reinstall.
Any pointers as to how to do it? As I say, I have a recovery partition.

How to do it changes from machine to machine. I would start with the manual for your machine that they probably put on the hard disk for you, closely followed by googling for ‘factory restore’ and the make and name of your machine

thanks. I’ll look into it.