Disk Space

[villafan58]

Iam running windows Vista Home Premium, My disks consist of C & D drives, they are both almost full, & i keep getting a reminder that i am running out of disk space. I have run a disk cleanup, & a defrag. i have got rid of shadow copies as well. But, all of this still hasn't freed up any space. can someone please help? it needs to be in easy language coz im useless otherwise. thanks.

[rojash]

Buy a bigger disk drive

[villafan58]

that was helpful !!!!!!!

[LeMarchand]

Download and run JGoodies Disk report (it's free). This will generate an easy-to-understand pie (or other) graph showing where the space is being used.

If it's a store-bought machine that came with Vista, it's likely that both disks are of a decent size so I would suspect that you have a lot of video files that could be moved to an external disk, or you have loaded on a large number of games, some of which you could uninstall.

[VHG]

>that was helpful !!!!!!!

It was VERY helpful.

You are running out of disk space, external disk drives are large, fairly cheap, and very easy to use.

You can buy a 500G external drive for around �50 or less.

By far the largest things on most peoples hard disks are video files.

Locate any that you have (that you may have forgotton about) and back them up to CD/DVD, or delete them if you dont want them.

If that is not your problem then hunt through your personal files and clear out anything you dont want.

Clear out your recycle bin.

Turn off Windows restore. This will purge all your old restore copies. Turn it back on afterwads if you want to.

Basically you will need to do some simple housekeeping on your hard disk.

[VHG]

Note that running out of disk space can get VERY serious if Windows has not got enough space to run.

Even though Windows is loaded into memory when it starts up, Windows also puts files out to hard disk when it needs more memory.

If Windows cannot find this space on hard disk it will eventually grind to a halt and stop working.

You should make sure you have a fairly large area of your hard disk (on the C drive) free for Windows to use.

So I would free up some space as quickly as you can (particularly if you are getting warning messages).

The quickest and easiest way of doing this is to buy an external hard drive and move all your personal files on to that, freeing up your C and D drive.

Which is exactly what rojash said.

[VHG]

If you could tell us how big your C and D drive are that would help.

Vista is getting bigger and bigger, and if you have service pack 1 and 2 on then it could be taking up 15Gb to 20Gb of your C drive on its own.

I recently re-installed Vista Home Premium on my PC, and then put service pack 1 and 2 on, and it takes 15Gb of my hard drive.

If your laptop only has a "small" hard drive (maybe 80GB or 120Gb) then Vista alone could be taking up a fair bit of it.

[VHG]

This is how you find out how big your hard disks are and how much space is free on them.

On the Windows Start menu select "Computer". This opens the Computer window showing your C and D drive.

RIGHT click on the icon for C and from the menu select Properties.

This shows the capacity of your C drive, the USED space and the FREE space.

Write these down, and do the same for the D drive.

When you have these figure, put them in this question.

Here is a picture of the window you will get to show your hard disk size.

http://www.geocities.com/uttoransen1/photo/har d_disk_properties.JPG