Stuff expands to fill the space available for it.

This Parkinsonian truism applies to your closet, your desk and your computer's hard drive. As the Iomega Zip drive tv commercial says, it's your stuff. But do you really need it all? Even today's multi-gigabyte drives fill up quickly. Thanks to Windows, careless software developers and "feature-itis," you never have enough storage space.

A full installation of the office suites that come bundled with so many PCs today takes up well over 200 megabytes, largely with stuff I never use, and I suspect that you rarely use it either. Worse, every time you install another Windows application it creates a series of "temporary" files that often become permanent, gobbling up yet more disk space.

When Windows does its traditional lockup or crash tricks, GPFs (general protection faults), or "this application has performed an illegal operation;" or when a power surge or outage breaks your Internet connection or reboots your system without a proper shutdown, even more files are left hanging around your drive. In addition to hogging space, the accumulation of all these files can cause conflicts resulting in yet other problems. Uninstallers (applications designed to completely remove all files associated with unwanted programs) help, but don't do the whole job, because some files are orphaned due to glitches, rather than installations.

Errorscan, from JE Software, is a small (1.3mb) application that simplifies locating and removing the detritus that collects on, clogs, clutters, slows and sometimes endangers drives. It scans your drive(s), quickly finding and listing every file that conforms to its default categories of junk files, and allows you to view them so that you can make an informed decision about which ones to delete.

Errorscan defines 32 file types that it won't let you delete because they are essential to system or application operation. For example, Errorscan won't display files with .exe, .com, .dll, .bat, .dat, .cab, .drv extensions, thus protecting you from accidentally deleting these and other crucial files. Advanced users can (cautiously) customize Errorscan to include other file types for scanning or for restriction.

Another protection is that Errorscan will not itself delete anything. It displays the files that fit its profile as likely to be created by errors, system hangs or power outages, and then lets you make the decision to delete. Candidates for deletion are identified by one line of information per file, containing file name, size, amount of allocated space, path (location on your drive), creation date and time, and attributes.

My 1st use of Errorscan on a Windows NT drive found 425 files on the four drive partitions I selected for scanning, totaling over two megs of allocated space. Most were html and gif files left over from Internet sessions. All were useless garbage that would have taken a great deal of time to track down manually. I selected and deleted them all with just 2 clicks.

Errorscan sells for under $30 (I've seen it for under $25 in catalogs). A free trial version for any flavor of Windows may be downloaded from www.errorscan.com.

Inexpensive, small, easy to use -- what a concept!

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