Thread: Running out of space

Given that you store dox/data elsewhere, a 120GB SSD should be more than big enough for your OS and a tonne of progs. Even W10 (ugh!) only requires 20GB HDD space. (Says me, who only has 120GB free of a 500GB hybrid-SSD C: drive. )

Have you also assigned your swap/temp files to another drive? With an OS on SSD, they really should be. Plus it generally frees up a surprising amount of space.

Come to that, are there any large(ish) programs still installed that you just don't need/use anymore?

If you like the access speeds of an SSD, why not just go for a 250GB SSD? You can pick 'em up for around $150-200. (You can get 500GB in low-end SSDs for not much more, but I'd rather spend a few more $ and get the next quality level up. About $400, I think, but they last about twice as long.)

Interesting, WIN10 on my laptop with everything on C drive only uses 50 Gig of space. Run a more in depth disc analyser which will read folders by size and see where all the space has gone. The usual suspects are temp files, recycle bin not empty etc. All my docs etc go onto a network drive and on my desktop computer all program installation goes onto another drive so if C drive crashes I have no regrets and just reload Windows, look at the secondary drive and see what programs are there and reload those and about a day later it is all up and running and I lost nothing at all. One of these should do it but I don't know if they are free or not

https://www.howtogeek.com/113012/10-...ur-windows-pc/

Originally Posted by Skew ChiDAMN!!

Given that you store dox/data elsewhere, a 120GB SSD should be more than big enough for your OS and a tonne of progs. Even W10 (ugh!) only requires 20GB HDD space. (Says me, who only has 120GB free of a 500GB hybrid-SSD C: drive. )

Have you also assigned your swap/temp files to another drive? With an OS on SSD, they really should be. Plus it generally frees up a surprising amount of space.

Come to that, are there any large(ish) programs still installed that you just don't need/use anymore?

If you like the access speeds of an SSD, why not just go for a 250GB SSD? You can pick 'em up for around $150-200. (You can get 500GB in low-end SSDs for not much more, but I'd rather spend a few more $ and get the next quality level up. About $400, I think, but they last about twice as long.)

Originally Posted by Chris Parks

Interesting, WIN10 on my laptop with everything on C drive only uses 50 Gig of space. Run a more in depth disc analyser which will read folders by size and see where all the space has gone. The usual suspects are temp files, recycle bin not empty etc. All my docs etc go onto a network drive and on my desktop computer all program installation goes onto another drive so if C drive crashes I have no regrets and just reload Windows, look at the secondary drive and see what programs are there and reload those and about a day later it is all up and running and I lost nothing at all. One of these should do it but I don't know if they are free or not

https://www.howtogeek.com/113012/10-...ur-windows-pc/

Thanks for the input guys.
I'm running Win 7,

I ran a program called CleanUp a couple of times and did a couple of restarts and got back 8G.
I'll have a go at reassigning swap and temp files to one of the external drives and I'll try the program you linked to Chris.

It is really interesting when you can sort the folders by size.

I downloaded and ran WinDirStat and found that \Local\AppData was taking up about 38G of space. I did a bit of research and found out how to move it to another drive, so I was able to pick up almost 40G of disk space. I have also moved the temp folders for Firefox and windows to an external drive. My SSD drive had swap disabled, so I couldn't pick up any extra space there.

Temp files can be ditched if you want, I would be looking at app data to see why it is so large.

-- run CCleaner, choose all the tick box options and purge everything. Look through the tabs and get slaying.
-- turn your swap disk ON and use the SSD. That's what it's for.
-- run TreeSIze Free and look at what's taking up so much room

-- based on that, move some of the crap onto a big second storage disk
-- move pretty much everything from MyDocuments to the big storage disk
-- use GoogleDrive. Download the ap and sync a drectory on the big storage drive to it. 15gb is free. 100gig costs only $3 (or so). This will save you from disasters (a bit). Put your documents in that directory.

as per your first image:
-- turn ON disk compression. Do it.
-- run Disk Cleanup, but importantly after clicking that tab, select the Cleanup System Files tab, but also Previous Windows Instillation File(s) option. This will remove all the cruft left over from updates. No other program can do this. You can usually recover 15gb or more.

Originally Posted by Chris Parks

Temp files can be ditched if you want, I would be looking at app data to see why it is so large.

Firefox and Windows temp directories are now on G: drive. The AppData\Roaming directory has been moved to G: drive also. I don't know what the purpose of this folder is, but it seems to contain copies of all my photos in the \Adobe\Bridge\Cache\1024\xxxx folder there is also a \256 folder that contains some images also.
There is also a folder in the \Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup, and a folder called naviextras, these folders are quite large

Snapshot of G: drive, where my temp folders and roaming folder are now located.
G-Drive.jpg

Originally Posted by woodPixel

-- run CCleaner, choose all the tick box options and purge everything. Look through the tabs and get slaying.
I don't use CCleaner any more as it wipes out all my logon passwords. I use a program called CleanUp!.
-- turn your swap disk ON and use the SSD. That's what it's for.
The swap file has reappeared, windows must have turned it off when I was running low on disk space. It has allocated 8G for the swap file.
-- run TreeSIze Free and look at what's taking up so much room
I have downloaded and installed WinDirStat.
-- based on that, move some of the crap onto a big second storage disk
Done, see comments on my reply to Chris Parkes.
-- move pretty much everything from MyDocuments to the big storage disk
All my documents, photos, music, movies are on drive E:
-- use GoogleDrive. Download the ap and sync a drectory on the big storage drive to it. 15gb is free. 100gig costs only $3 (or so). This will save you from disasters (a bit). Put your documents in that directory.
No way will I ever use a third party hosting site to store any of my data. After seeing what Google have done to NIK and what Photobucket has done.
as per your first image:
-- turn ON disk compression. Do it.
I asked about turning on Disk Compression in a previous post and was advised against it. See here.
-- run Disk Cleanup, but importantly after clicking that tab, select the Cleanup System Files tab, but also Previous Windows Instillation File(s) option. This will remove all the cruft left over from updates. No other program can do this. You can usually recover 15gb or more.
Done. recovered about 1.5G. I regularly clean up my PC.

Snapshot of C: drive after the cleanup.
C-Drive.jpg

Looking at the data supplied using WinDirStat, I realise that I ran short of drive space when I loaded all my photo's (well over 1000) and video (some 4K) from my recent trip. For some reason copies/thumbnails/whatever of everything ends up in the AppData\Roaming directory, moving this directory to another drive gained me almost 40G.

What are those search plugins? Are they a bunch of browser extensions? I don't like the sound of 'em...

Originally Posted by q9

What are those search plugins? Are they a bunch of browser extensions? I don't like the sound of 'em...

There's only one file in there - "bing-lavasoft.xml"