I'd like to comment on your great mag! I've been reading it since May 1996, and beforehand I was reading Australian PC User. I switched to PC World because you get more for your money and more interesting articles. Also PC User is too simple, whereas PC World is just right.
Down to business. A lot of people suffer from not having enough disk space, and if you have Windows 95, I have a way to help eliminate that by getting rid of everything on your hard disk that is on there more than once. Go to Explorer, and from the Tools menu choose Find--Files or Folders [you can also get there by choosing Find--Files or Folders in the Start Menu, or in Explorer or the folder browser press <F3>].
Select the Name and Location tab and in the Named field type *.* In the Look in field select your hard drive and check Include Subfolders. Click on Find Now.
Once the search is finished, make a shortcut to all of the files and place them in the folder of your choice. Now access that folder and every name that has a 2 or any higher number in the brackets means that file is on your hard disk more than once. Just delete the copy you don't want.
- Ben Myles
Editor's note: This is an interesting idea, Ben. There are a few points to note. On large drives you can exceed the maximum file count the Find feature can handle, which appears to be 10,000 files (yes, I appear to have more than 10,000 files. Probably some are duplicates. I hope so). Windows 95 starts to run pretty slowly after that.
To overcome this restrict the search. Just search for *.dll, or *.doc, or *.txt and there's some hope that you'll find less than 10,000 files.
To create shortcuts to the files, just open up the folder you want to create the shortcuts in, then select all the found files in the Find window, then right-click the found files and drag them into the open folder window. When you release the right mouse button, select Create Shortcut Here from the menu.
This works unless you find more than about 500 files, then Windows 95 starts to bog down creating the shortcuts. You can however create the shortcuts in small groups.
When a shortcut name duplicates an existing shortcut name, Win95 appends (2), (3) and so on. These don't indicate that the shortcuts point to duplicate files -- just files with the same name. Shortcuts take about 0.5K of disk space, so if you create 2000, you use up 1Mb. If you're short of disk space, you may run out while performing this procedure.
Before deleting, you need to find the target file to which the shortcut points, and check the file creation date, size and so on to ensure that you're not deleting a unique file. To find the target, right click on the shortcut, select Properties, select the Shortcut tab, and then click Find Target. Now right click on the target and select Properties.
If you've installed Microsoft Powertoys (see our Web site at www.idg.com.au/pc.world) you may have added a Target option to the shortcut right-click menu, which simplifies things.
There are utilities to makes this easier, including commercial programs such as QuarterDeck's CleanSweep, and various shareware utilities such as PC Sweep-32 (see the site at http://web2.airmail.net/sstump/ or try our Website) and Space Hound, Space Manager and SystemScan for Windows 3.x. We can't vouch for the quality of these programs. Perhaps readers who have tried them could let us know.
- Neale Morison
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Category: Win95
Issue: Oct 1996
Pages: 181
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Deleting duplicate files in Win95