The AM Forum

There are programs out there to remove duplicate files on a computer. Norton had it embedded in one of their anti virus programs. These duplicate files just take up extra space on a hard drive. I guess it's not too important on the large drives of today but on our old 40 gig drives, it may be another thing.

Any ideas out there??

Thanks Terry

format c:

but that mat be a bit drastic
 ;D

Me not love you long time for that suggestion  ;D ;D

If you're running Windows, you can try to locate files by, click Start, click Search, click all files and folders, put in the field the full or partial name of the file or files that you think are duplicated in other other directories, click Search. Once you find duplicate file names in different directories, you can highlight the ones you want to delete, and then right-click the mouse and delete them. Caution, at times, some identical file names are suppose to appear in different directories and deleting one may cause a program to stop functioning. And, even if it has the same file name, its function may be totally different when it's in a different directory.

Entering duplicate file remover into google gave me a bunch of hits.

I sometimes deliberately save several copies of files in different folders to make them easier to find.  For example, I might save a copy of a story related to how radio was used in the Spanish Civil War in my History folder and another copy in my Radio folder.

I think it's better to just surf through some of your document folders when you have time on your hands and manually delete files you are sure you no longer need.

Terry

There is a really great file manager that I use all the time to find files -- works a lot faster than Windoz.  It's called

Total Commander

It's fashioned after the old Norton Commander (with the two panels) for those of the old DOS days.  Its search engine is really fast.  It is also a killer FTP utility.  It's nag-ware but is fully functional.  You just have to click on 1 of three buttons each time you bring it up. The nice thing about the two panels is that you can do a search in one panel and then it will be displayed in that panel, then you go to the other panel that will bring up "hits" -- then you can go to files in that other panel and pick and choose what files you want to get rid of.  Sort of a comparison.  In fact, if you think you have identical file names, you can do a refined search in the second panel and then delete what you don't want.  Works slick.

You can download it at:

http://www.ghisler.com/

I liked it so much I bought the key (used to be 30 bucks), which you can copy over to any computer you own and it gets rid of the nag screen.
Al

Why. You can find any file using search. What folder it's in is irrelevant these days.