I am always running low on disk space!!!

  • Thread starter Thread starter Katie
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K

Katie

Hello - first of all I am not the most technically savvy of people, so if you
are kind enough to reply with some sort of offer of help, the more detailed
the explanation is the better it is for me. Otherwise I just get confused.

Ok I have an acer laptop which for various and assorted reasons I want to
throw out the window. Problem of course is that I can't afford another
laptop so I am forced to make the best of it. My main source of irritation
right now is that I am constantly running low on disk space

Ok the specs on my computer.:
Acer Aspire 5610, Genuine Intel CPU [email protected] GHz 1.73 GHz
1014 MB ram and the operating system is 32 bit.
(And I just noticed something about windows activation occurring
automatically in 3 days... I have no clue what that is. Adding that to my
list of confusion.)

On drive C I have 52.6 GB of used space and 8 kb of free space. Yep 8 kb of
free space.
On Drive D I used 27.7GB of used space and 24.5 GB of free space.

Now. I have no clue what I have that is taking up so much space. Quite
frankly I am baffled.

When I do the disk clean up I usually can free up only about 8 mb of space.
Which clearly is not enough. I also tried to move as much as I could to
drive D, but no everything can be deleted from Drive C, so theystayed on
drive c.

My program files folder, on drive c, is taking up more than 261 mb of space.
My windows folder, on drive c, is taking up more than 935 mb of space
MY DRV folder (have no clue what this is about), on drive c takes up 207 mb
so space.

Ok how's this for weird I just double checked to see how much space the
folders mentioned above were taking - and the numbers seem to change! program
files are now taking up more than 1.61 GB, oooohh, now a minute later its
2.17 gb.

I have no clue what is going on.
Clearly I want to free up space on c and don't know what to do.
I tried to take it to geek squad for them to solve several issues, (it won't
let me set up a wireless router - curses! If you want to help with that
too....), but they said to do something about my amount of start up programs
which I did, and that there wasn't much they could do.

Any help at all would be appreciated!!!!
 
Are you running Vista? If you are running XP you should post to an XP group
like microsoft.public.windowsxp.general. You may get useful answers here
but you will find the real XP experts in the XP groups.

You need to remove some files from your hard drives in order to make more
room. You can store them on cds or dvds according to what kind of optical
drive your laptop has.

The number you report that is changing as you watch is simply Windows
Explorer enumerating files on the fly. It is normal for folders with a lot
in them. Give it a couple of minutes and it will settle down to the correct
number of GB in folder.

Figure out which programs in your startup folder can be removed. Most third
party programs do quite well for you without running when you start your
computer. An exception is anti-virus, but programs that write your cds and
that you use to write letters don't have to run at startup. Take them out
of the folder. Get rid of as many freebie utilities that you have
downloaded as you can. They are clogging up your machine and are probably a
lot of what Geek Squad was referring to as "too many startup programs."
 
I am definitely running Vista. The Home Premium Edition.
When you refer to third party programs I am assuming you are referring to
programs like firefox, java, etc?
 
No, I am referring to freebie utilities that claim to speed up a pc but
actually do little.
 
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