By Rob Freeman Click tip-ster

Promise Ikechukwu asked:

What's the difference between hot swap and hot plug? I'm about to buy an external hard drive for my laptop and I've seen an advert talking about the hot swappable feature of the drive. What does it mean?

The answer is - they are both the same! When a drive - or any component for that matter - is hot swappable, it means that you can pull it out without having to shut down and turn off the power and restart the computer. External drives which are on a firewire or a USB port are usually hot swappable, as well as PC Cards for your laptop.

However, that doesn't mean you can just tug the cable out whenever you feel like it - you need to make sure you're not using the item when you unplug it. On Windows that means using the "unplug hardware" feature in the system tray, or in a Mac, dragging the drive out to the "trash".

It goes without saying that you shouldn't just pull components out of your computer without checking that they are in fact hot swappable.

Syed Abdur Raheem, from Karachi, Pakistan, asked:

Why is it that my C:\ drive gets smaller as I use my computer? In the three years since I bought it, the disk has shrunk from over a gigabyte free, to just 200megs. And I install all my programs on the D:\ and E:\ disks.

And John, Berlin, Germany, also contacted us to say:

I regularly defragment my disk and clean my Temporary Files, but this seems to have no impact. My disk is constantly full!

It's not that defragging and cleaning up temp files aren't a great start at clearing some space on the C:\ drive, but Windows has a myriad ways of generating data and scattering it around the whole disk.

The first tip here is to make sure you can see all the files Windows has stored. From any folder, click on "Tools", and choose "Folder Options". If you are using Windows98, this is on the View menu. You'll get a menu on which you should choose the "View" Tab. Right in the middle of the screen there is an option to "Show Hidden Files and Folders". Once you've done that you'll be amazed how much more you can see! Even if you install the main parts of software on other drives, usually there's always something which gets left on C:\, or put there by default. Temporary directories are a common cause of file build-up. There are temp files all over the place.

Internet Explorer can be a trouble-maker here. Here's how to limit the amount of space that it takes up. In the browser, go to Tools > Internet Options. Right in the middle of the screen you'll see the area which controls these temporary files. You can get rid of all the files stored so far with the "Delete Files" button. To stop some of them coming back push the "Settings" button and you'll see a slider where you can set how much disc space to use for temp files. Personally I put this very low, at 4 or 5 megs and no more.

If you're using Windows XP, it comes with its own drive cleanup software.

We also received a really good suggestion from someone who forgot to leave his name!

If you are a Windows XP user and your drive space is fast disappearing, try disabling the "System Restore".

The restore function does take up a lot of space, but if you disable it Windows won't be able to return to a previous version if something does go wrong with your computer. But to turn it off, you'll need to go to your "My Computer", right-click and choose "Properties".

If you have any questions or queries, please visit our "Contact us" page to get in touch.

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