Eraser v5.6: Erasing unused portions of HD?

viper69

New Member
I love eraser, beeing using it for years. But I have never used the feature that allows a user to erase unused portions of the hard disk.

Has anyone tried this, and lost information by acccident during the process?

Btw, this disk is my OS disk, and is nearly full.

I have MS XP Pro for an OS.
 
I run the feature twice a week (I have Eraser 5.7) and have never had any problems though I find my computer works better afterwards if after running a freespace wipe I restart my computer.

The only problems I have read about are people choosing the quick erase option in 5.8 which isn't there in our versions.

If you are running out of disk space a free sapce wipe won't really help though - you need to fre up space by actively deleting stuff (which eraser won't do) or increasing the amount of disk space you have by eg adding another hard drive.
 
the other alternative is to run disk cleanup and see if you have things that aren't really needed eg temporary files, temporary internet files. There's a free application called CCleaner which can help delete unwanted files that Windows loves to store around the computer. I use that too, it's free and does the job as far as I am concerned. You might find you have hundreds of thousands MBs of space that can be reclaimed (or even more). Read the CCleaner instructions first though, so you know what you are deleting (eg the Hotfix Uninstallers for Windows updates option, you can free lots of space (on my computer, so far about 500MB) but then would be unable to uninstall any update).
 
another thing that can use lots of space is never cleaning up the old System Restore points. You can adjust how much space is allocated to this feature. You can also use disk cleanup to clear all but the most recent restore point.
 
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