Not enough space on C drive

[Guest]

I have a Sony Vaio computer which came with 13 GB of Memory on C Drive and
about 95 GB on the D drive. I have had the computer for about 2 and a half
years now. I currently have 456MB of space on my C drive and 57GB on my D
drive. I have moved some files over to the D drive. I would have a
little more space on my C drive but then when I install a program on my
computer. I am a little hesitant to move alot of files from the C drive
because I don't want it to affect my computers performance. I cannot
install anything on my computer because even though I select browse and
direct the download to my D drive I still loose space on the C Drive. I
always get the Low Disk pop up warning and I go through the process of disk
clean up but disk clean up does not move but maybe 1% of the Crive. I
cannot burn Cd or do too much because of this issue. Please help. I wish
my computer would have came with 1 hard drive.

 

[Steven L Umbach]

You can uninstall and then reinstall some of your applications the D drive
which should free up quite a bit of space and you can move your swap
file/virtual memory entirely to the D drive which could actually improve
performance. I don't think moving your application to the D drive will slow
anything down unless your C drive is a better performing drive but I bet
your D drive is the better performer being newer. If you have hibernation
enabled on your computer be sure to disable that also in Control Panel/power
options. You can also move your My Documents folder by right clicking it,
selecting properties - move. --- Steve

http://aumha.org/win5/a/xpvm.php --- great article on swap file
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307886/ --- how to move swap file.

 

[Steven L Umbach]

Also in Internet Explorer set the size to be used for temporary internet
files to be around 40MB and delete the current temp files and cookies in the
tools/internet options/general page. Also try downloading CCleaner and it
will scan your computer and remove a lot of junk files. Just be sure to
configure it the way you want. For instance I have it set on my computer to
no clean typed URL's that you find in the drop down box of the address bar
on Internet Explorer. --- Steve

http://www.ccleaner.com/ --- CCleaner

 

[Ron Martell]

You can uninstall and then reinstall some of your applications the D drive
which should free up quite a bit of space and you can move your swap
file/virtual memory entirely to the D drive which could actually improve
performance. I don't think moving your application to the D drive will slow
anything down unless your C drive is a better performing drive but I bet
your D drive is the better performer being newer. If you have hibernation
enabled on your computer be sure to disable that also in Control Panel/power
options. You can also move your My Documents folder by right clicking it,
selecting properties - move. --- Steve

http://aumha.org/win5/a/xpvm.php --- great article on swap file
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307886/ --- how to move swap file.

It should be mentioned that there can be some undesirable consequences
if the swap file (paging file actually) is moved to a different
partition on the boot drive, such as it will make it impossible to
save the system failure memory dumps which *require* that there be a
paging file on the boot drive.

Ron Martell Duncan B.C. Canada

 

[Steven L Umbach]

Yes and the user will be warned about that at the time he attempts to make
the change. If that is important to him he can leave a small amount of
virtual memory [20MB or so] on the system drive. --- Steve

 

[cquirke (MVP Windows shell/user)]

You can uninstall and then reinstall some of your applications the D drive
which should free up quite a bit of space

Yes, especially large games. Often CD-based games take a large HD
footprint even when they need the CD to run.

But there may be easier things to do.

and you can move your swap file/virtual memory entirely to the
D drive which could actually improve performance.

If the Vaio is a laptop, D: will be a volume on the same physical HD
as C:, so this would impact on performance by increasing head travel
from always-in-use C:. The pagefile may be inappropriately large if
there is 512M+ of RAM, especially if 1G+ RAM, so it may help to set a
lower minimum size (say, 512M) in such cases.

Other "easy" space reclaimation is reducing SR allocation (do this
before you start your delete-a-thon, in case you need to Undo) and, as
you mention later, smaller web caches, especially IE. Remember that
IE's web cache is not only grossly too large, but is repeated for each
user account - clear and set in each.

You can clear Temp locations too, and these are also repeated for each
user account. Don't forget %WinDir%\System32\Config\SystemProfile as
a "user account", as well as legacy %WinDir%\Temp

Another "free lunch" is XP's wretchedly-convoluted native CD burning,
which typically leaves masses of crud in the relevant per-user
location. I disable recording and use Nero instead.

You can generally relocate bloaty items from C: to D: by rt-dragging
them to D: and clicking Move, with the notable exception of software
installs. Do this for per-user Music, Pictures, Video, CD Burning and
even My Documents; it's best to un-nest the first three from My
Documents so the latter is small enough to back up, so do them in that
order. Don't relocate pagefile, Temp and TIF (in that order of
severity) as that would cause adverse performance.

Search HD for all files, not hiding system and hidden ones, for all
files larger than (say) 10M. Be careful what you delete or relocate;
check context. If using MS AntiSpyware Beta about 6-12+ months ago,
look out for an absurdly massive Errors.log file in that application's
base directory; that is safe to delete. Remember, deleting won't
recover space if you delete to Recycle Bin and/or SR tracks the file.

Once you have boosted free space, defrag C: to consolidate it.

Are some Vaio desktop PCs? Does yours have two physical HDs? If so,
then Steven U's comments are generally back on the money. Separate
HDs can be better for speed, and certainly for survivability, but as
it's generally less cost-effective for a given (modest) capacity, it's
unusual unless the PC is custom-specified or upgraded.

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Don't pay malware vendors - boycott Sony

 

[Ron Martell]

Yes and the user will be warned about that at the time he attempts to make
the change. If that is important to him he can leave a small amount of
virtual memory [20MB or so] on the system drive. --- Steve

Paging files on two different partitions on the same physical drive
are not supported.

Ron Martell Duncan B.C. Canada

 

[Steven L Umbach]

In this particular case the user indicated he has two hard drives. Now
whether he actually has two hard drives or two partitions. --- Steve

Yes and the user will be warned about that at the time he attempts to make
the change. If that is important to him he can leave a small amount of
virtual memory [20MB or so] on the system drive. --- Steve

Paging files on two different partitions on the same physical drive
are not supported.

Ron Martell Duncan B.C. Canada