Recycle Gigabyte
You've installed far too many junk programs over the course of your computer's lifetime. You've gotten so many, in fact, that they're starting to take up more than trivial amounts of space! While having these files and folders on your computer won't have much of an effect performance-wise, it certainly is a burden on your computer's total amount of disk space.
So, now what?
Well, If you've come here, you must have tried something by now. The most popular choice is to go to the Window's Control Panel, Select “Add/Remove Software” and start deleting things from that list. While this is effective, the list doesn't always include everything.
So where is everything else? It could be anywhere, but there are a few ways to greatly increase your chances of finding them. Here's how:
The Solution
There's two very effective methods of dealing with these hidden junk files.
1.) Open “My Computer” and navigate to your hard-drive (Most commonly “C:”) from here you will find the contents of your computer's hard-drive. Look for a folder named “Program Files” and open it. Inside this folder you will find the vast majority of any software you've ever installed. They are all indexed by folder, so this is very nice for us! All we need to do at this point is to seek out the programs we never use or want deleted, and then delete their folder. Be sure to empty the folder from the recycle bin afterward, or you will not recover any of that precious disk space.
2.) Use Windows search! Now, I know a lot of people may be thinking, “That's stupid, how can I search for it if I don't know the name of it? I'm looking for a whole bunch of stuff!” but here's the idea:
Don't search for any file name or the name of anything at all. Instead, search by file size. If you search for anything that is bigger than 500 MegaBytes (or half a gigabyte, same thing) the computer will come up with a list of rather large folders and files on its own. You can then delete any of these to your choosing, or leave them be.
Never delete important system files! Play it safe! If you don't know what something is, it's usually better to just leave it be.

