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This month's article is from a recent hard disk upgrade I have done. The owner said she had deleted all the unnecessary files in Win95 Recycle Bin but it still didn't seem to help on her insufficient space problem. There are several reasons this can occur. To keep from squandering the media's real estate here are some hard disk basics. Each Hard Disk is divided into file allocation units known as Clusters. Here's the catch, there can only be 65,536 clusters per hard drive. The formula to determine the size of cluster is simply divide the hard disk size by 65,536.
An example is a 128 meg. hard drive, cluster size 2,048 bytes or 2k. A 2 gigabyte has a cluster size of 32,768 bytes or 32k. So, a file that is actually 10 bytes in size would occupy 2k on a 128 meg. hard drive but a whopping 32k on a 2 gig.
If you have a large amount of very small files, you would free up a large amount of space by copying them to a floppy. A standard 1.44 floppy's cluster size is 512 bytes.
Okay, now that we've got that out of the way there are two different ways to delete a file. One is DOS and the other is WIN95. When you delete a file in DOS it really doesn't delete it.
Instead it replaces the first character of the file with a question mark. DOS is designed to hide file names beginning with a question mark. The reason DOS reports more free disk space after you delete a file is because the operating system no longer protects the file from being overwritten.
This is why, if you've used some type of utility to recover a deleted file, you are required to type in the first character of the file. With DOS the space the deleted file occupied is immediately available.
Now with WIN95 it is completely different. First, Windows95 moves the deleted file to a special directory named RECYCLED, then it records vital information about the file ( such as its original name and location ) in a hidden file called INFO within the RECYCLED directory.
The end result is the now deleted file occupies more space. However, there is a way to overcome this problem. Locate the Recycle Bin Icon and right click on it. Next choose Properties and adjust the slide from the default 10% to 5%. Ten percent may not sound like much but it would be 200 meg wasted space on a 2 gig. drive.
In a nutshell, the old 16 bit FAT ( File Allocation Table ) is out dated and is currently being replaced with a new 32 bit version. But, it is only available on some new PCs equipped with WIN95 R2. This has fixed the cluster problem and in some cases you are able to reclaim close to 50% of your hard drive.
Steve is a car inspector at the Crest Yard in Fort Worth
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