My 80gig HD is running out of space. I've deleted all unnecessary pgms and I'm at the bare minimum. I have all my music and vid files on an external drive already and I'm at the max on my primary drive. Running WinXP Pro. Could it be the system restore files taking up all that space? That's all I can think of right now...

 

I'm in the same situation right now. On my primarly, and only daily use drive, I have 516mb left.

I have and external drive, but that's for backup only.
Im planning on picking up an external tomorrow, and i'll move the "My Documents" directory to it.


In the mean time for your shortage of space, you can adjust how much space usage System Restore uses by right cliking My Computer, and selecting the System Restore tab. I think its default is to use 12%...since I"ve been running low, I've just turned it off.


Anyone know if there's a downside to compressing a drive once it's at this point, almost full? I just noticed the "Compress drive to save disk space" is unchecked on my C drive.

 

hard drives are relatively cheap, just get a 2nd one.

 

There is a program called CCCleaner that gets rid of other files that you can't access easily. I used it on my 40 a few weeks ago, and it got rid of FOUR gigs of crap on my computer.

Do a Google search for CCCleaner, and you will find it. It is free, and it hasn't messed up any of my computers.

 

Easy if he isn't talking about a laptop.

FYI - I ordered a WD 250Gb 7200rpm internal drive for $85 from Buy.com yesterday. Of course, I found out later that they're backordered... Been needing a B/U drive for my wife's machine.

 

make your own external.

you can pick up a case and a HDD for relatively cheap...get the USB or firewire adapter and make your own...save $$$$

 

Everyone, thanks for your help, but I already have an external already. I just need to free up space on my primary drive. I don't understand, I really don't have any stuff on it and it's almost full. I just swapped this new one a few months ago and this comes up!

 

I would consider backing everything up and then formatting and reinstalling windows. I usually do this about once every 6mo to year. It usually saves about 2-6 gb of space. and in your case, unless you have a silly number of programs installed, it will clean a serious amount out.

 

Start here:

• My Computer
• Right click on the C drive
• Click Properties
• Note the numbers for Used & Free (what are they?)
• Click Disk Cleanup
• Do _NOT_ pick "Compress old files"
• Click More Options
• Click Clean Up under System Restore
• Click OK
• "Yes", you're sure

When it's done, go back to My Computer, Right click on drive, Properties then see how much free space you have. If you need (or want) more, go through the steps again but check "Compress old files".

 

I would say get a nice big HD to store videos and the like on...

I started on my computer with a 20 gig (it was a while ago), then I bought a 40 gig for storage, I upgraded the mobo/cpu/video and then I got a 200 gig SATA because I got a DVD burner, and I filled that one up with movies so I just got another 200gig SATA hd... for a grand total of 460 gigs of space, and it won't be enough in about a year

My next computer is going to have at least a TERAbyte of storage (probably dual 500 gigs, maybe dual 750 gigs), plus a smaller 10,000rpm hd (160gig) to run programs and windoze... that should last me a while

Man, I remember back in the 90's when a 100Mb hard drive was HUGE!

 

Oh, don't start... The first hard drive I owned was a 5 MEG drive for my Apple ][. Two 5 1/4" platters in an external cabinet.

 

Buy a new hard drive and use Norton Ghost to mirror image the data from the old one to the new one.

Buy an USB external hard drive enclosure for like $20 from Ebay, put the new drive in it, boot up the Ghost program, follow the steps to ghost the data over the the new drive, swap out the drives. Done.
I do this every day at work like a charm. No SIDS to change or anything.

 

I was just saying is all... I AM only 24 years young after all... I do remember using Apple II-e's though.

 

I remeber Apple II E's, and not using a hard drive, just booting from a 512K disk

 

Yeah, I still have mine and it still looks factory fresh. Anyhoo, with all this crap happening to my PC, I think it's time to look at getting a Mac! Oh yeah, please , thanks!

 

Is an internal hard drive faster than an external one? juat cause there's less physical distance for the information to travel i'm thinking

and would a second internal hard drive necessitate another fan inside the computer for better cooling?

 

Internal drive is probably faster because it is not going through an outside interface to get to the drive. Just logical.

Cooling is always good, a decent 80mm fan blowing across them should be fine in my experience, unless you are running 10k rpm drives.

 

i really wouldnt recomend this.

instead buy a new drive, back up old files on the old HD. install a new fresh copy of XP (id be nice if someone were to slipstream all the recent updates also do you dont hae 100meg of downloads just after you install windows)

then start reloading softwere as you need it. 6 months later if your looking for that one file you can alwasy boot up the old drive, but why copy all the crap over your not useing anyway!?

 

If all the stuff on your hard drive is really unorganized like mine, try going to start, search, files or folders, select 'search for all files and folders' and type *.*
When the search finishes sort the results by size and see if you have any massive files or directories that are just sitting around taking up space.

 

Thanks for the bump on this old thread. I figured out what was wrong with it. I have and external 300 gig HD. The reason why all my HD space on my tower was full was because it was also making restore points with my external as well. I have a lot of music and videos stored on my external and it was making all those restore points along with my c: drive. I reformated and it gave me an option to set restore points for my external and I clicked "HELL NO"!