marymack said:
I am so confused. My laptop has two storage drives, C & D. The D is much
larger than the C. Since everything defaults to the C it is already full,
and D is almost empty.
Does it matter what I put in the D drive? Can I just move things over
there
to save space in C?
No, you can't just move things there, in particular programs. This is
because the Windows Registry contains references to the current location,
and there is no realistic way to change all these. Uninstall scripts
created when programs install can contain the same kind of references, and
simply moving these will break them. If you want to move these programs,
the safest thing to do is uninstall and then reinstall, not accepting the
defaults but instead pointing to the D drive. Create a Program Files
folder there and then, when asked for install locations, you can just change
the C to a D.
There are a few other things you can do.
First, Internet Explorer has probably allocated a rather large amount of
space for its cache, often well over a gigabyte. Clear the caches and then
reduce this size and move the cache to D; in IE go to Tools, Internet
Options, Temporary Internet Files. Do two things: reduce the size to
something around 25 meg, and then click on Move Folder, navigating to a
spot you've created on D.
Next, there are probably a lot of temporary files. Get ccleaner
(
www.ccleaner.com) and run it. It will list and then remove these files.
Click on Analyse to see what they are, and Run to get rid of them.
Those two steps often speed up systems, because they reduce the number of
files that have to be indexed or virus-scanned.
Finally, you can also move your data folders to the D drive, or just create
a data folder there and start saving to it. It's important to keep data in
one specific location as this makes it much easier to back up.
http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/xp_shell_folders.htm
HTH
-pk
