Windows on c drive, no free space

carlih1

ok what is the difference, sorry for me being a bit thick here but not brilliantly techincal minded. Also why would it say there is no space left?

leesmithg

albertross wrote:

that's a 40GB drive.............., the 512 is ram.

what makes you think it has run out of space (right click on c: in explorer, and then click properties).

Even right click my computer and select properties.

Now I know why these companies make so much money on premium rate support help-lines.

No she has 1 drive. 512mb of ddr ram which is double data rate r.a.m.

albertross_2

ram is working memory used by windows and programs when they run. When you switch off, everthing held in ram is lost. Hard disks are where you save your data and programs, when you switch back on, the data is still there.

Ram is a silicon chip, a hard disk is a spinning aluminium cylinder, with a read head on, similar to an old record player and stylus (if you are old enough to have seen one).

leesmithg

Windows is usually installed already on new computers, with a cd rom disk that is a recovery disk incase you wish to turn windows back to how you had the system when it first was booted up.

carlih1

It wasn't installed on this one!

Rex_Mundi

I can't see the problem. The only thing wrong here is how a new computer could only have a 40GB HDD (should be much bigger nowadays).

This problem sounds like a badly partitioned hard drive, it's not a big problem.

Go to my computer (double click), and see what discs you can see (C, D, whatever). Right click on each one, and click properties. This will tell you how big that drive is, and how much space you have left on it.

If you only have a little space on C, and a whole empty disc on D, then don't worry. When you install new programs, get used to installing them on the D drive instead of of the C drive. Your computer will still access these, and run them normally.

Reinstalling may not be needed, and may well be best avoided if you're not sure of what you're doing.

carlih1

There is only two disk drives one dvd-rw and one hard drive, this has no free space on.

Should there be two hard drives?

leesmithg

No there is not two hard drives.

The optical drive plays dvd and cds.

It will tell you how much space is on a blank or non-closed cd disk or dvd disk.

wonderfullife_2

Hi
No there shouldn't be 2 drives, just because you have 2 hds, (and I think this is where the confusion lies) it doesn't mean all pcs have 2, yours friends pc has only 1 drive, the 40gb hd, which will be the c: drive.

albertross_2

ask your friend to check the size using the method described above. If you have filled up 40 GB, then you have either got some crap files on there (try search, advanced, all files larger than 9999kB to find them), or when you installed windows, you chose to partition C too small, and have loads of unallocated disk space waiting to be used.

by "this", do you mean the d drive, which is a DVD, and therefore will probably be showing up as empty/full.