very little hard drive space help please

[ruggief]

Something is going a bit screwy with my laptop and not being very technical I don't know what to do. I have a drive with 70GB memory but only have 597 MB free so it's really slow, I've tried disk fragmentor, compressing the drive, deleting all the temporary files which releases about 1GB, I've looked at all the program files (and there's not many) and they're barely using 10GB, I have McAfee security which I've double checked and it hasn't found any nasties anywhere. What could be using all this memory and how do I clean it up?
Many thanks in advance for any suggestions

[Doc.Spock.1]

Any videos stored ??

Ethel knows more but, if you look at the "properties" of all the folders in "documents" it should say what is in each.

Videos take up a lot.

[ChuckFickens]

As do music, and pictures can too if you have a lot.

Also download and run Ccleaner to clear a lot of junk temporary files

http://www.filehippo.com/download_ccleaner/

[ruggief]

Hi,

I do have itunes and a some photos and videos stored but I've checked the properties and they're less than 10GB combined, it seems as though 1 thing is taking up about 30GB and I can't figure out what!

[Ethel]

Is your hard drive partitioned so you have an empty Drive D (for example) with 30 GB on it?

[ruggief]

I have a data drive D which says it has 70GB with none used. Is this the same thing?

[ChuckFickens]

yes thats what Ethel meant.

You can move your Itunes music onto that data drive by following the instructions below

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1364

Which would free up 10Gb on your C drive.


also make sure you have emptied your recycle bin, often people don't ever do that and end up with several Gb's of stuff in the bin waiting to be deleted.

[Ethel]

Mystery solved then. :)

[ruggief]

Right I've done that, that was easy thanks Chuck, but it's only freed up 3.45GB, Can I move other stuff over as well??

[ChuckFickens]

You can move pictures, videos, documents, in fact pretty much anything in your "my documents" folder.

You can not move programs. you can however install any new programs you install in the future onto the D drive, select custom during the install and when it shows you the install path (c:\program files\whatever) change the C at the beginning to a D so it installs onto the drive with the space.

[ugly_bob]

I had a simliar problem a while back. 20GB of space was being used by apparently nothing!

It turned out to be temporary files that weren't being deleted from a program (Nero I think).

Can't help any further I'm afraid - PC blew up couple of weeks ago so can't check

[ruggief]

After freeing up the space, I've just turned my computer on and only have less than a GB free so something has used up all the memory I gaained by moving Itunes, if a program is doing this as Ugly Bob suggested How do I find out what it is??

[Ethel]

Download DiskPie

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,113 61,00.asp

This will show you what is taking up all the space

[ruggief]

Hi Ethel,

I tried this link, clicked on download and it opened a new window and nothing happened, download was in black type but no link to download, I have Vista is this the problem?

[Ethel]

Oh boo

I'll find something else

[Ethel]

http://www.jam-software.com/freeware/index.sht ml

[ruggief]

Hi Ethel,

I did this and it said 19GB, 13 for WIndows, 2 for Files, 2 for Program files and 1 for Users, everything else was zero so that leaves over half of my 70 GB unaccounted for, AM I doing something wrong?

[ruggief]

All sorted, thank you everyone for all your help, I ran the tree program that Ethel sent me through the other users and my husband had loaded a program for work that took up 42GB of memory, that's now been deleted and I'm functioning again,

[Ethel]

Hurrah!