Hard Drive Space

[Xander]

Hey, I have a 70 gig drive and it keeps going down to about 1 ;__; I'm gonna buy a new USB drive or something soon to keep some old stuff on... but wondering if anyone had any tips on the meantime on how to free up some space? I know there are few programs I used in the past..

I have this Sequoia View thing which shows which programs use up the most space.. (mostly just FFXI and music >_< ) But the rest all seems to be little things.

Does defragging do anything for space?

So any little things I can do (also should you defrag when the computer goes a bit sluggish, it's doing that a little too...) I think it needs a springclean!

[Owen Macwere]

hmmm... there are alot of solutions for this matter. try to defrag your hard disk, and all initial parts of it like if it is devided to more than one partial. C, D,E..etc.
Then I suggest you search for any parts of the prgrams that you uninstalled before. if you can have windows washer it'll really help getting back the lost space. it is a really tiny program that washs all the cookies, all the left over of programs and such.
also, i suggest that if you have more than one partial of the hard disk that you save all your documents and stuff in the other partials, like D, E...etc. and not in my documents as the last also is part of the partial C.

[rubah]

Defragging won't help you on space unless it runs into errors and drops files or overwrites them:] It just physically moves bits of files closer together so the drive head doesn't have to move as far to find all of big files. Since it doesn't have to move as far, it makes the drive read faster.

Definitely try cleaning out your tempoary files and folders etc

[Roto13]

I freed up space by going into my music collection and deleting individual songs I skip when they show up on my playlist. :P

[Samuraid]

Run: cleanmgr /d c:

If you use Windows XP, you can also lower the amount of disk space the windows system restore service can use.

[Mirage]

In either case, I suggest getting an internal hard disk drive for your PC, unless you plan on moving it around a lot. If you are unsure about how to install it, I'm sure some geeky guys in your class would love to help you out :p.

[Dr Unne]

Uninstall unneeded programs. In the control panel under Add /Remove programs it tells you how much space each program takes up. Often a small handful of programs take up as much space as all the others combined.

Same with data. One downloaded movie can be as big as a hundred music files. Or a couple hundred thousand documents.

[Xander]

Yeah, I found that with the programs thing, and music.. I think I still have too many bits floating everywhere. I'll try the other tips too, thanks.

I got an external hard drive today. I thought of an internal but..I really don't know anyone who can put them in except one person I'm avoiding :p Plus for some reason I hate the idea of asking people round just to do that, it feels .....cheeky. >_> Anyway I figured external may be easier...take up more room I guess, and more sockets, but eh.

Is there any other reason why internal would be better? Also..with my external one, is it okay to like leave it in permanently and use files from it as I would normally with an internal harddrive, or better to just store old stuff on then delete it from my current internal drive, so I make more space on that?

Nothing I bought today is working (well haven't tried the hard drive yet) so plz tell me it is a good thing to have. ;__;

[crono_logical]

I find external drives cost twice as much as internal ones over here, for how much space you get :p

Nothing wrong with leaving it plugged in and switched on permanently though, and using it as if it's internal - that's what I do :p You can move old stuff onto it if you want, though since it's new and empty, now's your chance to keep it organised :D

[Xander]

This one was £80 for 250gb which I think is good! Leaving it in would be much cooler I think.. <3

[ValiantKnight]

Internal -
cheaper
higher possible speeds
less prone to accidents since inside the case.

External -
more expensive for same space
cannot have as high as speeds as internals have achieved(but should be more than fine as they have come quite a good ways on externals then they used to be)
You can bump it... have accidents when its outside the case moreso I would think than if its inside.

But I could be wrong.

[Xander]

Thanks, I think I am going to get an internal one as a main new drive now and then just have a second back up on the external one I got.