spring clean of hard drive required....

shaun40400

hi folks looking for a little advice
my oh has an 80gb laptop and their is about 6gb available on each drive
the lap runs on vista, i can remove the obvious programs like games ,photos.docs eth
but its all the other junk that comes with it and feel uneasy when a file just says
eg..hyg micro with no other info and u cant open it to see what it is,,
and theirs a lot of these type of files
1 how much space can i get back on the 1st drive or how big is vista.
2 how do i know what is essential to the computer ie dont touch these files?? and what she has downloaded
3 the second drive im not to worried about 60% of this is photos and music files taken from the main computer
thanks in advance

INT1

My laptop was orignally XP and I installed vista on to it over the XP, Vista took up 79 gigs of it! I think it took up so much as it previously had XP on it and was not a factory Vista laptop.
Not sure about the other things you mention, can you delete them from user control panel add/remove programmes, if that fails go in to safe mode and try that?
I also turn off my system restore too which saves space.

debs626

I'm not a Vista user so I cant answer question one but whenever my pc gets a little sluggish or tight on space I use this

http://www.ccleaner.com/

It's a free application that cleans out the crap.

If you store your photo's, movies and music on a separate drive, I cant imagine what is taking up 74gb ??

shaun40400

aldo thanks for the quick reply
add / remove is ok for the main programs and im fine with this. but theirs a lot of files their i don't recognise and junk files that dont appear their ,that needs manually removing, thats where the help is needed
also i use revo uninstaller in hunter moad .

timbim_2

Look at WinDirStat. That will show you where all the space is being used.

totalsolutions

The way to go is a clean re install if you have owned it for more than 1 yr. You will need the support cd's. Backup all you work docs and photos etc..

Waste of time trying to remove files and folders ect.

shaun40400

thanks for ans
tought reinstall might be the ans
74g ??
two drives 40 each so actual 34/35gb
1st dive vista 24gb
2nd drive photo s 10gb ,,3 shrunk movies that need burning to !!!!!! 12gb mucic 5gb

rest is crap left behind by nice people like i tunes. who download thier crap even when you tick dont want this like their updater's eth

Bob63

ccleaner will remove some of the rubbish. It's quite surprising how much it recovers on a system that has never been touched.

shaun40400

this is my results
c drive 52.5% size 30gb files 96thou
e drive 47.5% size 27.6gb files 87th
on c..windows 44% 13.5 gb
users 37.4 11.4gb
prog file 9.3 2.8gb
< files> 7.5 2.3gb
rest is mb biggest is 500mb

on e..data
photos 74% 20gb
shared folder 26% 7.2gb
im fine with the e drive as this is photo and back up from the main comp so if i back this up to my portable drive i can clear that drive .
c drive is more of a worry as i dont wont to remove ms/operating files.

XDA

Buy a bigger hard drive i.e 160gb and just clone the old drive and copy onto new drive using Ghost or Snapshot?

aliEnRIK

System Restore and Volume Shadow Copy service will be using the space.

To recover it:
Click on Start, Computer, Right click on C: Drive, select properties. Select Cleanup, files from all users. In next window select more options tab then clean up under System Restore Points.

then follow THIS advice to lower the maximum storage size (Id suggest 4 to 10 gig)
http://www.davescomputertips.com/articles/vista/change_vista_system_restore_size.php