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General discussion

Hard Disk Clean up and Space

by cathylawrence Sep 22, 2007 1:52AM PDT

I need space on my hard disk. Started getting message that I had less than 5% space left - through the use of CCleaner and deleting files such as .bmp, .avi .log, help files, old docs etc I have managed to 33 % space on my hard disk partition. Is this sufficient? My system is still sluggish compared to earlier. I dont know enough to proceed futher but I did download ibackup and idrive. ibackup is very slow it seems and I also downloaded thier product idrive to create what I think is a "virtual drive"? which frees up space on my hard drive? I use my computer for the most part for pictures I take - I transferred all of my photos to the idrive and it didnt seem to make a difference. I dont know what else to do. Does anyone have any suggestions or advice?
My system: Windows XP - Intel(R) Celeron(R)CPU 2.50GHz 2.52GHz, 960 MB of RAM.
Thanks.

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5 Posts
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Exactly what system do you have ...Dell, Gateway, HP ??
by VAPCMD Sep 22, 2007 3:12AM PDT

What's the current hard disk capacity ?

How about putting some of the files...PICs, AVIs on DVDs ?

VAPCMD

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hard disk space and storage
by cathylawrence Sep 22, 2007 4:31AM PDT

E Machine - my hard disk capacity states 38.28 GB, used 25.26, free 13.02.
My Cd Rom Drive stopped working recently after having the power supply replaced. I am thinking I might need to look at it because as I was told recently "it is probably unplugged" - I am clueless about hardware and it scares me to open my computer up and poke around.

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If you had the power supply replaced ...
by Kees Bakker Sep 22, 2007 4:38AM PDT

an didn't do it yourself, just go back to whoever did it and complain about the CD-drive no longer working. Any reasonable repair shop will have a look at it and not bill you, unless the cause is clearly unrelated to what they did (and that's hard to prove!) or the drive has to be replaced.

Kees

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Re: disc space
by Kees Bakker Sep 22, 2007 4:33AM PDT

In principle, free disc space has nothing to do with performance of the system. Although, if it's badly fragmented and you didn't set a unfragmented swap file when it was still rather empty, you might see a difference between 5% free space and 33% free space.

It won't harm at all to defrag now to see if it helps, but don't expect miracles.

Sluggish systems generally are caused by (unnecessary) background processes running and using the CPU or too much RAM. Might be unnecessary 'normal' programs and services and might even be malware. A critical study of the Task Manager screens might be a good start.

Kees

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hard disk clean up and space
by cathylawrence Sep 22, 2007 7:02AM PDT

ok - but could you expand on the background processes and too much RAM - I thought the more RAM the better. Also, how would a critical study of the Task Manager Screens help me and how would I proceed or know what I am looking for?

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