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Idaho Fish and Game

Clean up your hard drive - Make ArcGIS run faster.

idfg-aschmidt

ArcGIS can run slowly if you have limited hard disk space.  Having less than 20% hard disk space free will affect ArcGIS performance negatively - aim to keep as much hard disk space free as possible. Performance is also affected by your computers processing power, RAM, and video card - these are more costly fixes that may be beyond your control at the moment.

After talking with IDFG technical support they suggested downloading a couple programs:

CCleaner from http://www.piriform.com/.  This is a free program that is easy to install and run.  It's a great tool for cleaning up those mysterious windows files that seem to take up so much space.  

Tree Size (http://download.cnet.com/TreeSize-Free/3000-2248_4-10139400.html is a program that will find where the most disk space is being used.  If you have a file name 'RR backups' contact IDFG technical support and they will guide you through removing this file.  

Other places to clean up:

  • ArcGIS has a home workspace usually defaulting to "C:\USERS\#YourName#\My Documents\ArcGIS. Default.gdb is a file geodatabase that can get clogged with interum GIS files.  Within ArcCatalog go through and purge anything within Default.gdb not of use anymore.
  • Purge unneeded files within  "C:\USERS\#YourName#\Downloads\".