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You may not notice it at first sight, but a deeper look will surely reveal a few dozen duplicate files on your hard drive, eating up precious disk space. Are you going to stay there, without lifting a finger? Of course not. Plus, you can count on several software apps which will lend you hand in the tedious yet rewarding task of removing duplicate files from your computer.

There are different kinds of duplicate removers, depending on the type of file you want to delete. You can find general purpose tools, and also other tools that have been specifically designed to find duplicate MP3 files or duplicate images. Whatever your personal situation is, take a look at the following list and you'll find the right app for you.

1. Remove duplicate files This is where you'll find the largest number of available apps.  They all serve the same purpose: find and remove duplicate files, no matter what type or extension they are. Most of them support the usage of filters to refine search, and use different methods to find duplicates: size, name, byte-by-byte comparisons and CRC checksums are some of them. The only problem is that they usually have very similar names, so if you find one you really like, be sure to learn its name! Here are some of the tools you can use, all of them for free:

• Duplicate Files Finder - Open source tool that stands out for its speed at searching

• Duplicate File Finder - Features multi-thread scans and can also delete empty files

• Fast Duplicate File Finder - With built-in preview for images and multimedia files

• Easy Duplicate File Finder - Flexible scanning options and support for multiple drives

2. Remove duplicate MP3 MP3s are the kind of file you're most likely to have scattered across different platforms, devices or folders, which usually means you have a dozen copies of the same song. In order to avoid this mess, the best you can do is make use of a duplicate remover that's been specially developed to locate and delete duplicate MP3 files. Here's a couple of them, both for free:

• Duplicate Music Files Finder - Finds duplicate MP3 and also corrects misspelt tags

• Music Content Inspector - Slow yet very efficient MP3 duplicates finder

3. Remove duplicate photos Photos are not as common as MP3 duplicates, but if you have a digital camera and transfer pics to many other locations you can also end up with a few copies of the same picture. Again, there are specialized duplicate detectors for photos, which scan your photo library and can detect similarities not only between their names and sizes, but also their actual content. Here are two of them, both for free:

• Duplicate Images Finder - Analyzes the content of the image to find duplicates

• SimilarImages - Uses a fast method to scan your system and detect duplicate photos

If you've got a big photo collection, managing your images can be tough enough. It's even harder when duplicate images, created either accidentally by yourself or by Windows, invade your collection. One option is to simply trawl through each album and weed out the duplicates. This is obviously time consuming and can be painstakingly difficult if you've got several very similar images or if your files are labelled with very similar names.

Don't tear your hair out, though, because help is at hand from SimilarImages, a program that does much of the hard work for you. SimilarImages has a graphics engine which searches the contents of your images and computes the differences between them. The degree of difference you want the program to search for can be set according to your needs and it's remarkably accurate.

SimilarImages starts by conducting a comprehensive scan of your hard drive which can take several hours if you've got thousands of images.We suggest you start with just one folder, to begin with. Images are then displayed side by side, along with data on their file size and resolution. From here, you can choose which one to keep and which to delete. If you are impressed with the results and feel the program has detected exactly the right duplicates to delete, you can set SimilarImages to delete files automatically. This method cuts out the hassle of going through the results and is best configured using the images' creation dates because most duplicate images are generated after the original was saved on your PC. Just tell SimilarImages to delete older duplicates and you'll have cleaned up your collection in no time!

Be very careful, however, that the program is detecting the images you want to delete and not your precious originals! Either way, we recommend you backup your images before using this program, just to be safe.