Gently, folks, it's that wanabee geek, Openacres, asking obvious simple questions again!
In my new rig, I have two hard drives, which I fondly thought I could divide as 'programmes drive C' and 'files storage drive D'. There are three users of the system, me, her and us.
the C dive is 74.3Gb available space. c:\Programme files occupies 13.7Gb.
C:\documents & setings\me\application data takes a whopping 34.2Gb. in fact, there's only 8.7 Gb free space left on the disk, which apparently is not enough to run a defrag or so XP says!
Now onto the D drive. That is a total of 298Gb available space, of which 45 GB IS USED UP. the path D:\Me, takes up 31.3Gb of this, and all my photos (see some on my Flikr site) ocupy 27Gb of that.
Now considering we used to run on a single 80 Gb hard disk (which I now use in an enclosure as an external-USB connected disk) , whee the hell is all that space going? What IS all this 'Application Data' stuff? and can I merely move it into the D-drive?
I keep the machine well tuned, using THREE clean-up programmes (Advanced System Optimizer, Ashampoo's WinOptimizer 4 -(sorry, my American friends, I'll never like those "z's") nd SpyBot's Search and Destroy. Lord only knows how much more space I'd lose if I didn't put everything back in the cupboard neatly!
Sorry if this is 'lesson two' stuff, (lesson one being 'how to unpack your computer and switch it on), but I'm old enough to remember carbon paper!
……..and just some advice to other wrinklies out there…….. if at first you don't succeed, sky-diving is probably not for you!
lotsalove!!
Well basically I can say sky diving is not for me!
Moving along, have you ran any antivirus or antispyware scans on your PC to check for possible infections? It's usually a good idea to do first when space seems to be be used from nowhere you can work out.
Another factor is the picture files you mentioned, are they all or mostly in the .bmp format? I ask, because this file format is the one of the most file size intensive formats for image files. It does preserve alot more graphic detail than many other formats but in return takes up more space. The PNG format allows you you to retain a high picture quality whilst reserving a bit more file space but it still takes up more than say a GIF or JPG file, I know this as I am also an amateur game designer.
Windows Defragger doesn't allow you to defrag a hard drive that has less than 15% free space on it, hence why you aren't being allowed do do so. This is done as a precautionary measure and as someone who only has one hard drive that only has 40GB on it I know how annoying this can be! I have used other degragging programs and I believe some allow you to bypass this but off hand I can not remember what ones they are.
I would suggest installing SequoiaView. It's a great little program that gives you a graphical view of the data on your hard drive, making it very easy to see where all the space has gone, especially if there are large files involved.
After you start it, select View, Colors and check Color Scheme. Makes it much easier to see.
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rst guys, thanks for your ideas. Second, apologies I’ve been away out of reach of computers. (I need sanity time occasionally!)
EnigmaChick, I’m with you on the file formats. Indeed, mine are even more space hungry; they’re TIFFs and RAWs mainly – a few jpegs. BUT they are stored on my D: drive, the 300Gb one. I’ve ron as many spyware/virus programs as I can find: AVG 7.5; Malwarebyte’s anti-Malware, Spybot’s Search and Destroy,Advanced System Optimizer, Ashampoo’s WinOptimizer 4. They all say I’m clean..
Ztruker; Downloaded your big tree programme, but noy quite sure what I’m looking at or what it’s telling me or, more importantly, what I’m meant to do with it! Here’s a screen grab, together with the Explorer version 📎whatthetech_reply1.doc
the biggest file is the Applications Data file, herewith the grab of that, together with the details of the program files folder. 📎whatthetech_reply2.doc
Hoping for your conitinued help and interest
And today’s wrinkly thought….. Any astronomer can predict with absolute accuracy just where every star in the universe will be at 11.30 tonight. He can make no such prediction about his teenage daughter
