Acer Aspire V Laptop- Problem With Free Space- Help Please!

[moggie 939]

Hi
Cannot understand why I keep getting a message saying 'only 5 gb free space left out of 95gb on my laptop.
I am not very experienced with these things but y use my laptop for emails, photos and searching internet. Yet.........where is all my free space?
To help you all I have stores on this laptop is about 950 photos (no videos) and about 1500 emails stored on Thunderbird. Is this anything to do with it?
Thanks everyone

[murraymints]

Why would you keep 1500 e mails ? clearly you have an issue somewhere ... lots of Apps... games ? delete any you don't use..

[Guilbert53]

A lot depends how your hard disk is "split up".

Some laptop companies split a hard disk up in to "partitions" (like C drive, D drive, E drive etc) - Note one will probably be your CD/DVD drive if you have one.

Windows and all your programs will probably be on the C drive. There then may be another partition of D or E for your "data"

Now if you have set up some sort of backup program to run regularly then this may be copying itself to the D drive and it may be the D (or E) drive that is filling up.

Can you see what partitions you have, how big they are, and what free space you have left? This is fairly easy to do with Windows

If you tell us what version of Windows you have we can tell you how to do it.

[CrapAtCryptics]

100gb is very small by modern standards, Windows alone in basic form is 20gb. Changing to a larger HDD is a fairly simple task and not very expensive. For example Ebuyer has a 500gb drive for £36. If you dont want to do that backup your pics to a stick and maybe, if they are stored on your machine, do the same with those emails.

[moggie 939]

Thanks Guilbert 53 and everyone. Firstly may I tell you that I have now deleted all my emails and put all my photos onto a memory stick, cleaned everything with Piriform Cleaner and this has increased my free space by about 4GB and I now have 9GB free out of 95GB!
In answer to your questions about discs (I am old and not very tech savvy) I went into PC and it shows only 'C' and nothing else I have no CD only 3 usb ports - 1 fast and a slot for a SI.....card or what is it called? I only use the laptop for internet searches and emails - I have no downloads of videos or music at all. It came with Win10 installed. Although there does not seem to be a partition for recovery, a short while before this low free space occurred I did make a back up of everything to an external hard disc in case of a laptop failure. Could I have also at same time put all this onto the laptop somewhere - or am I being paranoid!

Any further help would be appreciated as I am stumped and I now when I bought the laptop 6 months ago it said something like 56GB free of 95GB.
Thanks everyone