Creating free space on my laptop.

[bossychloe]

Is there any other way of creating free space on my laptop apart from Defragmenting and Disk cleanup?

I only use my laptop for browsing the internet, storing some pics and a little music yet I have discovered I only have 23% disk space left?! And it is running soooo slow, it is driving me crazy.

Any suggestions, (in step by step format, unfortunately I am still a computer dunce!)

Thanks x

[BillySugger]

Maybe a daft question but how much space did you have to begin with ? Do you have Vista or XP?

[vehelpfulguy]

Few things:

1) The amount of data on your hard disk has NO effect on the speed of your computer. Clearing space on your hard drive will not speed up your computer. Defragmenting MAY speed it up a little (but not much).

2) 23% tells us nothing, is it 23% of a 5Gb drive or 23% of a 150Gb drive. Try to find out how big you hard drive is. There are a number of ways of doing this in Windows.

3) Some companies split the hard drive into 2 partitions, usually the "C" drive and "D" drive. You MAY have a totally empty D drive (if you do have a "D" it may be your CD/DVD drive and not your hard drive so check carefully).

4) By far the largest files on a hard disk are video / movie files. Check your hard drive to see if you have any large video files you have forgotton about (within Windows you can search for files by file size so maybe try that).

[ChuckFickens]

you use your laptop for storing some pics and a little music

How big is the hard drive to start with, but....

if its from a camera each pic is likely to be between 500kb and 3Mb depending on the resolution of it.

Each music track will probably be 4Mb+ with 4 being the min! I've got 12Mb tracks easily (actually I've got 200Mb Mp3's but they are 2 hour long essential mixes)

A few pics and a little music can soon eat into a smallish hard drive.

[ACtheTROLL]

while disk space doesn't have a direct influence ... lots of little files (as chuck says - like photos - and ironically also like windows) cause havoc because the database of what's where (mft) is so big and it also increases the potential for fragmentation as you add a few here and a few there
(having more than 25000 files in a single folder is another good way of messing with NTFS)

like many things in windows the ntfs file system (in theory at least) uses a proportion of what's available (like the waste bin and system resore) - MS say it needs a 20 -25% "overhead".
( if you are interested read http://support.microsoft.com/KB/315688
but it's pretty boring)

so you are absolutely right in quoting the %
however the total is also important..

CCleaner will help keep the count down
http://www.ccleaner.com/download

and a defrag every so often won't go amiss either .... but the best solution is get a CD/DVD burner .... or a USB HDD and shift as much data as you can over to it