Laptop HDD Full

chateauneufdupape

I have a Toshiba Satellite U500 which is running on Vista Home Premium SP2. It has one 320GB HDD which seems to have been partioned, from new, into a "C" drive and a "Data E" drive, both of which are 115GB. The "C" drive is now almost full, 108GB used and 7GB free. All my documents are stored on the "C" drive. The "Data E" drive just has 4 folders in it, the main one being "HDD Recovery" which is 14GB. I have never saved anything knowingly to this drive.

How best should I free up space on the "C" drive? I am not a srious techie, so please bear this in mind with your responses. Thanks in advance.

closed

d: drive is a dvd/CD or hard disk partition?

move data to your d/e: drive, have a cleanup with ccleaner, and backup to an external drive if any of this data is important

windirstat will tell you where all the space is being used

7GB free is far from full.

ddoris

As posted windirstat will show what's taking up the space . . . but I don't follow how only 2 x ~115 on a 320GB hdd ?

googler

chateauneufdupape wrote: »

How best should I free up space on the "C" drive? I am not a srious techie, so please bear this in mind with your responses. Thanks in advance.

Download windirstat, and use it to figure out what is on the C drive.

Cut/paste some of what's on the C drive (your data, not programs) to the E drive. Pictures, music files, docs, spreadsheets, etc are all candidates for moving

chateauneufdupape

I have checked the HDD capacity and it is 250GB and not 320GB as originally posted. So 2 X 115GB gives 230GB which still misses 20GB. There is no "D" drive that I can see. The "F" drive is the DVD drive. I will download windirstat and give it a go.

I had got down to 500mb free, but cleared a lot of junk out to get back to 7GB.

John_Gray

You would expect the disk capacity in Windows to be about 7% less than the manufacturers state, so that 250 x 10^9 bytes actually turns out as 232.8 GB. Because measuring things in thousands/millions/billions of bytes gives a Bigger Number, then the disk manufacturers work in powers of 10, whereas we are used to considering a kilobyte as 1024 bytes, and so on. See the discussion of Gigabytes and Gibibytes in Wikipedia... There is also a small overhead imposed by the NTFS disk format.

For another view of what is using up your hard disk, try TreeSize Free.

NeverAgain_2

How about curing the problem for the foreseeable future by installing a bigger hard drive?

I read somewhere the process is fairly simple.

And has the OP backed-up the data?

I'd want this done before any tinkering with the hard drive.

John_Gray

NeverAgain wrote: »

How about curing the problem for the foreseeable future by installing a bigger hard drive?
I read somewhere the process is fairly simple.

"Fairly simple"? You forget that the OP describes himself as "not a srious techie".

In the short term it is far easier deleting Stuff which isn't needed than reinstalling Windows or cloning it to a larger hard disk.

And, yes, Everything should be backed up, Always. Preferably to several different types of media, and by several methods (e.g. folder and file backups, image copies, etc).

alanrowell

The simplest solution would be to buy an external drive and move all your data (videos, mp3s, photos whatever) to it.

This will give you the required backup and it's going to be a lot easier than trying to archive files to DVD.

Once done you can see how much space that frees up on the C drive.

You can then use a drive repartitioner to reduce the size of the C drive and increase the size of your E drive - leave the C drive with about 10GB more than it has currently. Then copy the files from the external drive to the larger E drive.

http://download.cnet.com/Easeus-Partition-Master-Home-Edition/3000-2248_4-10863346.html

After that you need to save files to your E drive in future - if it's because you save files to "my pictures", "my videos", "my music" then you need to change the location of "my documents" to somewhere on your E drive

http://www.mydigitallife.info/change-my-documents-folder-default-location-path-in-xp-and-vista/

S0litaire

First thing to check is that you've gotten rid of old temporary files...

Click start then type in the search box:

%tmp%

That will take you to the folder where your temporary files are stored.
You can safely delete everything in that folder (note their will be one or 2 files or folders that won't delete! that's ok! just leave them)

That should free up a chunk of space...

Then move your "My Documents" over to the E:\ drive using the link in the above post... ^_^