Your company's IT department has received complaints that several computers are running slowly. Investigation shows that the hard drives on these systems are almost completely full, which can negatively affect performance. Which disk-management task should you perform first to address the issue?
Defragment the hard drive to optimize data access
Increase the size of the existing partitions on the hard drive
Clean up unnecessary files to free disk space
Convert the file system from FAT32 to NTFS to improve efficiency
Freeing up disk space by deleting unnecessary files should be the initial step. A nearly full drive leaves little room for the operating system's paging file, caches, and temporary files, which can significantly slow performance. Removing unneeded data immediately recovers capacity without risking user files. Other tasks-such as defragmenting, expanding partitions, or converting the file system-do not reclaim space and may not be possible or useful until adequate free space exists.
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What types of unnecessary files should I consider cleaning up?
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How does a full hard drive affect system performance?
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What other disk management tasks can help improve computer performance?