Deleting programs

[Jerry]

I recently went into the Control Panel's "Add or Remove Programs
selection and found two programs that I never used. They were Java2
Runtime Environment SEv 1.4.2_05 and 1.4.2_06 ... each of those
programs were using over 105 megs of hard disk space and I wanted to
get rid of them to free that space up.

My hard drive said that it had 40% free space before the deletion and
43% free space after I deleted them.

The problem came the next day when I checked my free space and found
that it had dropped back down to 40% ... I have no idea how this
happened and it seems to be the very same amount of space that I had
gained by deleting the two Java programs.

Does anyone have any experience in this area? How can I find out what
exactly is on my hard drive and how can I safely remove all the stuff
I don't want?

 

[Michael T]

I would begin by running Disk Cleanup - followed by Disk Defragmenter.