Low Disk Space

System restore is the devil.

You can delete things off your hard drive, but get a jump drive (they are cheap) and back some things up. Keep in mind that jump drives aren't 100% reliable and can randomly corrupt data... Email backups and external hard drives are somewhat more reliable.

Other than that, I'll leave you to the pros...

I have a few questions for you to help me diagnose what your problem is.

What operating system program do you have and what type of computer is it (brand -- laptop/desktop)?

What size hard drive do you have?

How much music/movies/pictures do you have on your computer?

What types of antivirus,spyware,malware, and adware do you have on your computer?

From these things I may have some more questions, but for now if you answer these, I will have a better idea of what the problem may be.

Elysium, if your computer is ten years old, I am surprised that it is still running. Feel fortunate for that.

It appears that you really do not (just as you said! ) know much about computers.

The most important question:

How much disk space did you start out with? You can check this by right-clicking on My Computer or otherwise making your way to the C:\ prompt.

Right-click on C:\ and then choose Properties.

You should see some kind of summary of total disk space, amount used, and amount free. It is important to know if you started out with a lot of space, because if you did not, it is pointless to try to delete enough files to free up space.

You have probably been saving all sorts of things to your computer for ten years. Pictures, in particular, take up an ungodly amount of space. After a while you just won't have any room left.

In any case, you need to back up all your files that you want to keep. The computer could die at any moment, and your files will be gone. There is a way to recover them, but you cannot do it yourself, and it is expensive to have it done.

How to back up depends on your computer. The easiest way is to save to a memory stick (thumb drive), but I don't know if your ten-year-old computer will have the little ports (USB) that one sticks the thumb drives into. Thumb drives are cheap and have several gigabytes of memory.

If you know anyone who is more computer-knowledgeable than you are, you really need to get someone to help you. None of this is difficult at all, but it is hard to explain, here, every move that you would have to make to go about backing up.

To go back to the original issue ... Yes, you can free up disk space by deleting programs and files. Again, it would be better if you had someone on hand to help you.

Random: Netbooks are dirt cheap and come with 160gigs of hard drive space.

Good luck getting sorted. For future reference, AVG is a good free antivirus program.

PS- Take more digital pictures

38.2 GB!!! Well there is your problem.

I have a 120 gig hard drive and I have 95 gb of space already used, between pictures and music, writings, operating system programs, and other programs.

You need a second hard drive, or an external hard drive.

Just xp alone with the sp3 updates takes up something like 10 gb, along with the itunes program and then music you are lucky to have 15 gb left for other such stuff.

One computer game can take up to 2gb of space.

One song usually takes up 4-8 megabytes of space.

One picture can take up to 2 mb of space.

Once you add all that stuff up, 1000 megabytes makes a gigabyte.

Open office writing program takes up about 400 megabytes of space, windows office takes up about 2 gigs of space in total between all the different programs included.

If you have a printer, it takes up space too.

Every device you add to your computer takes up hard drive space.

It doesn't sound like you have a virus, just the need to upgrade your hard drive.

Some towers and mother boards allow you to piggy back a second hard drive directly into your tower, though I am not sure about your tower. For about $100 you can get an external hard drive with up to 1 terabyte of space on newegg.com. There are some that are smaller and cheaper, but for ease of use an external is probably your best bet. Unless you want to upgrade your computer totally.

I assume you know how to empty the recycle bin? That's usually presented to you as an option when you start getting low disk space messages.

You should delete all your temporary Internet files, and any other temporary files you can find. Some of these are presented to you by Windows, some you have to hunt down. For instance, look in the folder where you keep your word processor files, and see if you have any weirdly named files dated on some day when you had a crash years ago.

If you've done all of this, one thing you can do is lower the size of your disk caches. I use Firefox, and the cache is under Tools|Options. Many people find that they don't need or want a huge cache.

Windows restore points are another hog. I guess the option to delete some of them is presented to you when you get the low disk space message, though.

Another thing you can try is reducing your virtual memory. This one is tricky. First, you have to get an idea of whether you actually have excess VM. You can get a sense of how much VM you use by running task manager. To actually reduce the VM, you can look at the control panel, probably under "System Properties|Advanced."

A second hard drive would be cheap, assuming we're talking about a desktop with a place to stick it. You can easily move your VM to the second drive, which will free up a ton of space without having you actually have to move any files you actually know about.

If your disk space seems to be vanishing without reason, try doing a search on everything that is dated higher than whenever you did the last disk cleanup. This will give you some clues as to where to focus.

Download CrapCleaner to get rid of all the hidden stuff which is taking up room, and run a decent defragmenter every so often as well. Really, you need to get an external hard drive / new computer if you want a lot more memory to play with.

38.2 GB is more memory than some other ten year old computers shipped with, but these days (with so many things that take up memory) you need 100 GB at the very least.

> Size hard drive: 38.2 GB

You can buy a 200GB+ hard disk dirt cheap nowadays. And most large electronics chains with service counters have hard disk move services. It's a good investment if you plan to keep your computer for a few more years.

-cb

I can also recommend you get an external hard drive (my 250g drive was under $100) and use it for your file storage -- manuscripts, pictures, other projects, etc. Keep as much of that off your PC's hard drive to help keep it running smoothly and if you need to take the PC in for repair, there's a lower risk of data loss if they need to do a complete wipe and restore.

Windows' system restore could be cut back to using 10% or less of disk space. Is the hibernation option enabled? That's not necessary, and it produces a huge file that could be deleted.

But one of the worst things is downloaded installation stuff. And MS Office stuff. If you have an Office install disk, you don't need the install files copied to your hard drive. If you have downloaded other software to install, get rid of the installers.

Music is the next big space hog. You really ask for it when you start collecting.

Do back up everything you want to keep, before going on a vendetta. An external hard drive with a complete copy of everything would be excellent. But don't use Windows' backup -- you don't want to restore things as they are if you get a new computer with a newer operating system! Just copy everything. Then you can search for the files you need on the backup drive when the time comes.

Once you have a backup on an external drive, you can get rid of enough excess baggage to make room to install a good backup program to do automatic backups for you.

A local geek-friend would be handy.

Good grief, a 10 year old computer? You can get a low-end new computer for $500 which will have 10 times the space of your old one and be much faster and able to run new programs. Consider it a safety investment, because hard drives are not designed to last longer than 10 years, you never know when your old one may kick the bucket. With a new one you could back up everything regularly onto a thumb drive or secondary hard disk.

sunandshadow said:

Consider it a safety investment, because hard drives are not designed to last longer than 10 years, you never know when your old one may kick the bucket.

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^This.

I only have one remaining hard drive left from the nineties that hasn't turned into an elaboate paperweight. Upgrading is the curse of the modern world.

bluebell80 said:

38.2 GB!!! Well there is your problem.

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Hell yeah.

I say get an external drive and transfer everything to that.
Also get a DVD burner.

Fenika said:

System restore is the devil.

You can delete things off your hard drive, but get a jump drive (they are cheap) and back some things up. Keep in mind that jump drives aren't NO COMPUTER STORAGE DEVICE IS 100% reliable and can randomly corrupt data... Email backups and external hard drives are somewhat more reliable.

Other than that, I'll leave you to the pros...

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Just my own personal rant, ahem...


And I'm wondering how/why a 10 year old computer is running XP...the OS must have been updated since the computer was new.

Ever put a hard disk in a computer? You can more than double your disk space cheaply enough, it would (after you fdisk and format it) show up as drive D:.
http://www.pcprogress.com/product.asp?m1=pw&pid=WL40ATA100-54

You might buy two and image your current drive on one of them while it's still running.

Just for fun, I bought four of those a few weeks ago to get some older computers running (with Ubuntu). The three I've installed so far work fine.

But maybe that's more than you want to learn. I second others' suggestions if buying a new computer. You can get a netbook for as little as $200 and it'll be a big improvement.

I learned years ago about low disk space, and eventually, the computer stopped working because it could not even load the start up. I lost some very important files that we could not retrieve.

My son built me a new computer and I also have purchased several external hard drives. I use one for picture and art work, and the other for my other important files. I have gone through two more computers since then, just because I needed to update to faster processers and such, but I have not lost anymore files thanks to my external hard drives. I even plug my laptop into them every now and then and transfer files I do not want to lose, including emails.

Even if you get a new computer, the external hard drive is a great investment because if even your new computer craps out, you still have all your files, provided you remember to save to the external drives.

I highly second (and third?) the recommendation to buy an external hard drive. There are two different kinds - ones you plug into the wall for power and others which you just plug into the back of the computer, in the USB port.

The advantage of the drive that doesn't need to be plugged into the wall: it's extremely portable. The larger external hard drives that require being plugged into the wall are a hassle to unplug and move around. A USB-powered external drive saved my a** last month when my desktop computer crashed and burned, because I had all my photos, writing and music downloads backed up to this drive.

This is the first time I've had a computer crash and die where I haven't lost any of my important files, because I was diligent about backing up my data on a regular basis. You only have to lose irreplaceable digital pictures once in your life to become a fanatic about backing stuff up. Also, I have lost digital music files in the past, which I paid for, and that really sucks because most of the time, you're out of luck when it comes to asking for a replacement download.

The other advantage of a small portable external drive is being able to easily switch back and forth between a desktop and a laptop.

Amazon.com is a great place to buy electronics, as long as you buy directly from them, bypassing the third-party sellers. Right now they have a 1 TERABYTE external hard drive available brand-new for $96.00, and shipping is free. I'm old enough to remember 5 1/4 floppy drives, so a terabyte drive makes me hot.

Disk space, etc.

I am pretty sure that Elysium does not know how to do all of that stuff that you guys are recommending.

The simplest thing would be to get a new computer, and to have some knowledgeable person help to back up the old stuff.

But I would like to offer a dissenting opinion on the issue of massive memory storage. Yeah, it's great to have it, but you don't have to. My six-year-old laptop only has 52G. I still have about one-third of that space free. I have lots of programs and files on the disk. However, I don't keep a zillion pictures of 1.5M each stored on it. I off-load them to CDs or memory sticks.

No matter how much space you have on a hard disk, you can always use it up by being indiscriminate in what you store there.

Historical note: My first computer with a hard disk had a whopping 10M (! ) of storage. I never filled it up past about 3M. I think my writing program only allowed a file to be 64K. You had to break longer documents up into "chapters" or some such division. It was severely limiting, but I still felt like I was in heaven.

ComicBent said:

I am pretty sure that Elysium does not know how to do all of that stuff that you guys are recommending.

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I'm very sure Elysium doesn't know how to do most of the stuff recommended in this thread. I restore old computers as a hobby and I don't know how to do half the stuff on this thread, lol.

Here is a super-simple thing you can do to see if your music is taking up too much space on your hard drive, since you say you have a lot of music in iTunes on your computer. iTunes should tell you how much space your music is taking up. Make sure you have your music library selected, then just look at the bottom of the screen. It tells you how many songs you have, how many days they'll play total, and most importantly how many GBs of space they're taking up on your HD. Here is a screenshot of me checking my iTunes library.



If you have more that 15GB of music, that may be taking up too much space on your hard drive along with all your other programs.

But I would like to offer a dissenting opinion on the issue of massive memory storage. Yeah, it's great to have it, but you don't have to. My six-year-old laptop only has 52G. I still have about one-third of that space free. I have lots of programs and files on the disk. However, I don't keep a zillion pictures of 1.5M each stored on it. I off-load them to CDs or memory sticks.

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I second your dissent. I have no idea what I would use a terabyte hard drive for, since I no longer do video editing. All my music and pictures take up something like 30gb.

Can i ask a question in relation to the external hard drives?

I've used usb sticks to back up my work (and email) but my laptop has recently been plagued with viruses (I've McAfee and i used to have superantispyware which refuses to work now) so now almost all of my usb sticks are unusable because they've been infected with virus (and when used reinfect my laptop).

Are external harddrives the same? I'm thinking of getting a new laptop and want to transfer all my files etc to it when i get it, but with a virus riddled laptop, would this mean all my files (and by extension external harddrive) be infected if i transfer them?

Sorry for jumping on the OPs thread!

Chasing the Horizon said:

I second your dissent. I have no idea what I would use a terabyte hard drive for, since I no longer do video editing. All my music and pictures take up something like 30gb.

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Every computer user's needs are different. I have a 160 GB external drive that's full and I've just bought a 500 GB external drive to supplement it. At least 80 GB of that data is directly related to writing projects and research.

I have a 1 terabyte Apple Time Machine external drive used exclusively for backups my partner and I connect to wirelessly. It's been a lifesaver since we've had to restore his computer a couple times.

JulieHowe said:

Every computer user's needs are different. I have a 160 GB external drive that's full and I've just bought a 500 GB external drive to supplement it. At least 80 GB of that data is directly related to writing projects and research.

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If the OP has been making do with a HD of less than 40gb up to this point, I doubt she needs to upgrade to 1 terabyte.

You must have a lot of pictures or movies or something for your research, because I don't think it's possible to have 80gb of text. I have over 2 million words of text on my 500mb flash drive and it's only half full, lol.

Chasing the Horizon said:

If the OP has been making do with a HD of less than 40gb up to this point, I doubt she needs to upgrade to 1 terabyte.

You must have a lot of pictures or movies or something for your research, because I don't think it's possible to have 80gb of text. I have over 2 million words of text on my 500mb flash drive and it's only half full, lol.

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You're right on both counts. Actually, what takes up space under the 'research' category for me are graphics-heavy PDF files. Text files are nice because they don't eat up much hard drive space.