How to expand/increase the size of an existing virtual hard disk in VMware Player

I guess I was a bit stingy when I initially set the size of my virtual hard disk and had to pay for that later on. But sometimes it’s impossible to foresee a future need.
Don’t you worry now! It’s a piece of cake to expand the virtual hard disk at a later point in time. Just follow these steps:

1. Make sure to backup your virtual machine before proceeding. Just incase!
   
2. From VWware Player (I’m using version 3.1.3), select the virtual machine you want to expand and click Edit virtual machine settings.
   
3. Choose the device Hard Disk (IDE), click the Utilities button and choose Expand….
   
4. Enter the new maximum size in GB and click Expand. This will take a moment.
   
   
   
    Your virtual hard disk is now expanded but the guest operating system is still not aware of this.
   
5. Start your virtual machine.
   
6. If your guest operating system is Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista or Windows 7 you could expand the volume in Disk Manager. But if your guest operating system is Windows XP like mine was you have to use a third party utility. I used EASEUS Partition Master which has a free edition for home users.
   
7. Download, install and start EASEUS Partition Master – Home Edition.
   
8. Choose the partition you want to expand and click Resize/Move Partition. Move the slider to the desired size (probably all the way to the right) and click OK.
   
   
   
9. Click Apply and EASEUS applies the new size to the volume.
   
10. You can now stop using CCleaner every five minutes