Basic non-techy advice please

[jimirabbit]

I would like some basic advice please about Eraser. I'm not very techy but I'm also not thick :wink: , so if someone would kindly just clarify a few points for me;

Firstly, I want to perminantly erase files which I've deleted over the last year. Here's what I did;

Run as admin - File - New Task - C:\ - click OK.

Everything seemed to be going fine, the window said 'erasing unused disk space'. After about 1.5 hours the green bar finally went to 100% then the window changed and it said pass 1/1 and 'overwriting' there was a new timer saying 30 mins. When the timer got to 17 mins I checked my hard drive free space and it had gone down by half! I checked a minute later and it had gone down even more! So I cancelled the operation with about 15 mins left to run. Then I noticed the free space on my hard drive had gone back up to just slightly less than it was before. So can someone please explain to me why when it is overwriting does the free space go down so much? Does it stay that way once the overwriting proccess has finished? Or will the free space return?

Also, this may seem like a stupid question so please forgive my stupidity but am I correct in thinking that this program doesn't actually remove the files from the computer, but just makes it impossible to find them? In which case, does it not actually free up space on the hard drive? Will it make my computer run faster?

Thank you in advance.

 

[Joel]

Everything seemed to be going fine, the window said 'erasing unused disk space'. After about 1.5 hours the green bar finally went to 100% then the window changed and it said pass 1/1 and 'overwriting' there was a new timer saying 30 mins. When the timer got to 17 mins I checked my hard drive free space and it had gone down by half! I checked a minute later and it had gone down even more! So I cancelled the operation with about 15 mins left to run. Then I noticed the free space on my hard drive had gone back up to just slightly less than it was before. So can someone please explain to me why when it is overwriting does the free space go down so much? Does it stay that way once the overwriting proccess has finished? Or will the free space return?

The free space should return; the free space goes down as part of the overwriting process.

Also, this may seem like a stupid question so please forgive my stupidity but am I correct in thinking that this program doesn't actually remove the files from the computer, but just makes it impossible to find them? In which case, does it not actually free up space on the hard drive? Will it make my computer run faster?[/quote]You can specify files to permanently remove if you want to, select a file or folder and execute the erasure. Eraser can free up space on the hard drive if you tell it to erase existing files.