C Drive full, running out of disk space

[GraemeC]

my girlfriend laptop has a small 40gb C drive, we have removed all the photos etc to an external HD and deleted the originals and temporary files it is still however it is still saying "low diskspace"

when i look at the files on the C drive it does not equal the same amount as it says, eg most files contain only 1Gb on just 800Mb so where is the rest of the 30 odd gb on the c drive

Confused.com

[ChuckFickens]

Obvious first...

You've deleted the files, but have you emptied the recycle bin?

[factor-fiction]

I agree with chuckfickens for the starting point.

I assume you have been through the Disk Clean up process (right click on C drive, then select Properties, then Disk Clean up, and select the options for what you want to delete).

It may be you have lots of restore points that you no longer need- these may be taking up a lot of space.

Videos/films and to alesser extent music, can also occupy a lot of space.

Finally for now, if you have programs that you wanted to delete you should go through the full Remove Programs process.

Let us know how you get on.

[VHG]

You dont say what version of Windows you are running, but my Windows folder (Windows 7) is over 12Gb. And that does not include programmes, personal files etc.

Is 40Gb the TOTAL size of your hard drive, or is it just the C drive, and you also have a D drive on the hard disk. Some hard drives can be divided in to C AND D (although D may be your CD/DVD drive).

If the laptop is quite old then it may be only a 40Gb drive, but if it is newer then 40Gb sounds small for a laptop hard drive.

[VHG]

A free program caled Treesize will tell you what files are on your disk and what are your biggest folders.

It is free and you can get it from here

http://www.jam-software.com/freeware/


Note: DONT just randomly start deleting files and folders. Windows keep all sorts of hidden and system files all over the place so dont just delete a file or folder because you dont know what it is.

[factor-fiction]

I think you can also sort all files by size on Windows can't you?

[TTG]

Search all drives for files with the name *.* and size at least set to 500000k (500mb). Should find all the large video files you have. avi, mpg and mpeg are the most common. If unsure of file extension, search on net.