Hard Drive

[AnnInglis]

How do I do a major cleanup of my hard drive? It is so full that it won't even run defrag.

[wildwood]

In Xp it is in Start/All Programs/Accessories/System Tools/Disk cleanup.

[vehelpfulguy]

It depends what it is full off.

By far the largest files on a hard disk are usually video files or movie files.

Have you got any video files that you could perhaps back up to CD or DVD, or if you dont want them delete them.

Windows has a Search option which allows you to search for files BY SIZE. So you could do a search and find the largest files on your hard disk.

Once you get a list of the largest files you can decide if you want them or not, and if not delete them.

Remember some may be Windows system files so dont just delete something without knowing what it is.

[vehelpfulguy]

Some questions:

Do you know how large the disk is ?

Is it all one partition (like C: drive) or does it have a D: drive as well (your D: drive MAY be your CD drive).

To check this go into My Computer and have a look at the icons for your hard drives.

Right click on the icons for your hard drives and select Properties. This will show you how much used space and free space you have.

It will also show you a little pie chart with blue and red sections showing how much space you are usng.

Try to do this and let us know how many drives you have and how much space is free on each of them.

[AnnInglis]

C Drive Capacity: 13.6 GB
Used Space: 12.8 GB
Free Space: 808 MB

D Drive Capacity: 5.00 GB
Used Space: 776 MB
Free Space: 4.24 GB

It only has a CD Rom, I suppose that is what it is called.
No DVD. There are no videos downloaded on it that I am aware of. I bought it used, about 3 yrs ago.

Pics and anything that I felt was safe to move to D Drive have been moved. It appears that D Drive is totally seperate from C Drive.

[AnnInglis]

I have already done the normal disk cleanup. In fact I have been doing it over and over to keep my computer from crashing. At times I've got as low as 200 MB of remaining space.