Freeing up hard drive space

[tony cooper]

So I was right.


Oh well, that should be more than big enough to transfer stuff off of
the internal 30GB hard drive. Take one of those disk size utilities
we've already mentioned, and just display where all of the biggest
folders are, and move them right off to the external disk. Just make
sure you keep only the critical operating system-related files on the
internal 30GB disk, which are all of the files and folders under the
"c:\windows" directory. Usually the files inside the "c:\documents &
settings" folder are the ones that grow the fastest, and some of those
need to be moved out.

You should also encourage your daughter to start saving her files to the
external drive from now on. I know a lot of people find using another
drive, other than "C:" to be confusing, so they just end up saving
everything to the first drive, so you'll have to drill it into her that
saving to another drive is not that difficult.

I'll make this the last post, so thanks to all who made suggestions
and to all that make them after this appears.

I drove up there today and spent a few hours with my daughter's
computer. Finding the problem was less difficult than I had
anticipated. She said she'd moved her .jpgs to her external drive,
but that turned out not to be the case.

She had .jpgs in folders she didn't know about, and most were
duplicates. Double-downloading from SD card, I think. I swear, she
doesn't know what the "delete" key is for!

I ran a search for files ending in .jpg (she doesn't shoot RAW) and
moved all of them to the external drive. Also deleted some programs
(ie: all the Epsom stuff since she now uses an HP printer), and ran
disc cleanup. There are more programs that could be taken out, but I
didn't have time to check them out. There are a lot of HP programs in
her System folder (The computer's a Compaq Presario) that I didn't
know what are.

Picked up just over 6GB. Since the HD is only 30GB, and it was full,
that was considerable. The only problem was how long it took to find
and move the files.

Ended the day giving her a severe lecture on deleting files from her
250GB HD before it, too, becomes full. She's now downloading from her
SD card directly to the external HD.

The laptop is 6 years old, and slow. Very slow.

 

[philo]

Actually, no, my time isn't worth much at all. I'm retired, this is
my daughter's computer, and it's an interesting challenge to me to try
to solve the problem. I'll drive the two hours up to where she lives,
spend some time futzing around with the computer, have dinner with my
daughter and her husband, and drive back home. Not a waste of time to
me.

I offered to buy my daughter a new laptop, she said she'd rather work
with the old one now and buy a new one herself when she's ready. All
she uses it for is downloading images from her camera and working on
them in Photoshop Elements. She doesn't even have internet access.

As far as y'all wasting your time, most that reply to questions like
mine are people who do it for the same reason I'm wasting my time
fixing up the old one: the challenge of figuring out solutions.

And, I appreciate the help.

Yep.

To me, I really enjoy working on computers
and offer computer repairs to all my friends.
Its' more of a social thing and a way for me to see more of my friends.

Unless the problem is minor and I can solve it in a few minutes...
I take the machine home and work on it early in the morning before I go
to work. I always find it "a lot of fun" to make the most our of the
hardware I am working with and though I may add some RAM to a machine if
needed...I find that any XP machine with a 20 -40 gig drive usually does
the job just fine

 

[Tim Meddick]

Just one more thought, if you do have another, larger, drive to be able to
save non-system files to - then it is an easy thing to do to move the "My
Documents" folder from it's current location by using the facility in the
Desktop "My Documents" LINK ....

Right-clicking on the desktop shortcut to "My Documents", should give you
the option to "Move" the location to another - including on another drive!

This is only if the "My Documents" desktop shortcut is the "special" link,
and not just one set up manually by the user.

You can make this special "moveable" link appear on the desktop by
check-marking the appropriate box under the "Desktop" tab of the "Tweak
UI" control panel.

==

Cheers, Tim Meddick, Peckham, London.


P.S. Microsoft's "Tweak UI" can be obtained by clicking on the link below ;
http://download.microsoft.com/downl...a6-b352-839afb2a2679/TweakUiPowertoySetup.exe

 

[ctowers]

I'll make this the last post, so thanks to all who made suggestions
and to all that make them after this appears.

I drove up there today and spent a few hours with my daughter's
computer. Finding the problem was less difficult than I had
anticipated. She said she'd moved her .jpgs to her external drive,
but that turned out not to be the case.

She had .jpgs in folders she didn't know about, and most were
duplicates. Double-downloading from SD card, I think. I swear, she
doesn't know what the "delete" key is for!

I ran a search for files ending in .jpg (she doesn't shoot RAW) and
moved all of them to the external drive. Also deleted some programs
(ie: all the Epsom stuff since she now uses an HP printer), and ran
disc cleanup. There are more programs that could be taken out, but I
didn't have time to check them out. There are a lot of HP programs in
her System folder (The computer's a Compaq Presario) that I didn't
know what are.

Picked up just over 6GB. Since the HD is only 30GB, and it was full,
that was considerable. The only problem was how long it took to find
and move the files.

Ended the day giving her a severe lecture on deleting files from her
250GB HD before it, too, becomes full. She's now downloading from her
SD card directly to the external HD.

The laptop is 6 years old, and slow. Very slow.

Hmm... now she'll need to find a new "problem" to encourage
you're next visit. ;-)

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

You should also encourage your daughter to start saving her files to the
external drive from now on.

I completely disagree. The enormous majority of people who do that do
it instead of backing up, and that's a very poor way to attempt to
protect your data. Good protection of data exists when you have two or
more copies of it, on separate media.

 

[Zaphod Beeblebrox]

I completely disagree. The enormous majority of people who do that
do
it instead of backing up, and that's a very poor way to attempt to
protect your data. Good protection of data exists when you have two
or
more copies of it, on separate media.

I don't think that was intended as a backup strategy, rather a method
to preserve disk space on the small, primary drive. Point taken
though, she should be backing up her data.

--
Zaphod

Arthur Dent, speaking to Trillian about Zaphod:
"So, two heads is what does it for a girl?"
"...Anything else he's got two of?"

 

[tony cooper]

I wasn't talking about backups in anyway here. I was just talking about
it based on the fact that the external drive is much bigger than the
internal drive, and therefore can hold more stuff.

Downloading to an external HD instead of C: does not cause a loss of
data protection. A DVD, or DVDs, can be burned from the external HD.
I have always encouraged my daughter to burn disks as back-ups. She
does that.

The safety feature is in multiple copies of the data, not to which
drive to which the data is downloaded. The unsafe majority are the
people with no external drive and/or the ones who don't burn copies.

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

I don't think that was intended as a backup strategy, rather a method
to preserve disk space on the small, primary drive. Point taken
though, she should be backing up her data.

No, I didn't take it as a suggestion for a backup strategy. My point
is that the OP or anyone else reading the thread was likely to see it
that way. I've seen *many* people who do what was suggested instead of
doing a real backup, and I wanted to point out that that's a very poor
choice.

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

I wasn't talking about backups in anyway here. I was just talking about
it based on the fact that the external drive is much bigger than the
internal drive, and therefore can hold more stuff.

Understood. See the other reply I just sent in this thread.

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

Understood. See the other reply I just sent in this thread.

And rereading my original message, quoted above, I perhaps came on too
strongly, and it may have sounded like an attack on you. So I
apologize for that.

 

[(PeteCresswell)]

Per Zaphod Beeblebrox:

I don't think that was intended as a backup strategy, rather a method
to preserve disk space on the small, primary drive. Point taken
though, she should be backing up her data.

There's a whole rant tb written here about redundant backups and
all that....

But, dealing with a number of people who view their PC as
something akin to a toaster, I think it's hopeless.

For low-volume, the best thing I can think of is to hook them
into some sort of unattended service like Carbonite or install a
utility like SecondCopy that can FTP backups to someplace else.