The Disk Cleanup utility will scan your system to find items that you can safely remove. It will allow you to remove any downloaded program file including Java applets and ActiveX controls from Web sites. These are not files or programs you have chosen to download they are temporary items that may safely be removed.

Temporary internet files and Web pages cache can take up a lot of space on your hard drive. While these may help make your browsing experience a bit faster they have expiration dates but they don’t automatically delete when they expire. Removing these files will not affect any of your web settings and it will not delete the internet cookies either.

Emptying the Recycle Bin is also important. You may think that deleting files is good enough. But you do not actually re-gain the space until you empty the recycle bin.

Other files that are important to clean out include the temporary remote desktop files which are created when you use the Remote Desktop utility. If you connected using Remote Desktop often it would be advantageous to keep these files however if you don’t then just get rid of them.

When your computers operating system was installed setup log files were created. These are useless if you have no need to see what happened when your OS was installed. Also if you upgraded your OS there are backup files from the old version of the operating system that you can safely get rid of as well.