Space on Drive C

[chrissa1]

I've just seen that I only have 4.3GB space left out of 61.00GB on my laptop. Is there anything I can do to free up some space and if so, how do I do it? Thanks.

[MarkRae]

Well, at the risk of stating the obvious, remove stuff you no longer need.

Go through your installed applications and see if there is anything you no longer use. Do the same with your documents. Finally, open Windows Explorer, right click on the drive, select Properties and then do a clean up. Make sure you remove all but the most recent system restore.

[TTG]

Backup to an external hard drive. You might have some big movie (avi or mpg for example) files on your drive.

[scotman]

Do a full backup of the drive.
Then do some serious housekeeping and clearing out. Tools like Windows CleanUp can help. Also you can remove all your old restore points.
When you have got rid of everything you don't need do a defrag of the drive. I use PerfectDisc but the one included with Windows will do an adequate job.
Do this regularly from now on!

[chrissa1]

Thanks for that. The last time I would have thought about this, ie making a backup, it was in the era of floppy disks which I understood and could label and store physically. Easy. Now, do I use a DVD disc or a CD Disc?

Say, I want to trim down my Documents. Do I have to delete each one individually or can you remove blocks of them? I seem to have hundreds and hundreds

[ChuckFickens]

the only difference between CD's and DVD's (that's relevant here) is the amount of data they can hold, DVD's can fit nearly 7times as much information on them than CD's, so for large backups DVD's are more suitable.

you can delete/move several files at once in a few ways, either hold down the Ctrl key while you click each file you wish to select and you can select as many as you want, then press delete to delete all selected. or. To select a whole list of files or folders, click the top file in the list, hold down the Shift key and click the last file in the list to select the two files you clicked on and all files between them and again press delete to delete all selected.

[chrissa1]

Ok, I've got plenty of blank DVDs so fingers crossed. Cheers.

[LeMarchand]

If you can afford it, get yourself an external USB drive. For around £30 you could get a 160GB disc (though I'd recommend buying the highest capacity you can afford). It's a lot quicker and easier than discs - just drag and drop. Some even come with easy backup solutions installed, though these normally add to the price; you could either buy or use some free suitable software (Snapfiles may have something suiyable: http://www.snapfiles..../system/fwbackup.html ).

I'd recommend using JDisk report http://www.jgoodies.com/freeware/jdiskreport/ which provides an easy to understand chart of where the space is being used on your disc.

[chrissa1]

Thanks Lemarchand, I can't afford that at the moment but I'll keep it in mind for when I can.

[chrissa1]

Wow. Just downloaded the free jdisk programme and I can now see how much disc space I've used, which is mostly in pictures and videos. Cheers.