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General discussion

Low on hard-drive space and I'm stuck -- what can I do?

Jun 3, 2016 5:12PM PDT

Dear Sirs/Madame,

I have encountered a problem on my wife’s Lenovl Laptop. It is giving a message that "disc space is very low." It also says that the browser is outdated, but you can’t update because there is like 700 MB of remaining space, which is not enough to load anything. We have Charter Security Suite furnished through our cable company, but I can’t run the scan either. You can browse on Internet Explorer but no room for any type of download and the Google Chrome browser is gone totally -- it shows that three things have crashed each time we try to use it. Maps Galaxy Google for Chrome and F-Secure Extension. Also will not perform Windows Update. It gets to 16% and says there is a failure to update Windows updates and is “reverting ‘…do not close computer. I'm stuck and I don't know what to do. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

--Submitted by Jim B.

Post was last edited on June 10, 2016 2:11 PM PDT

Discussion is locked

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Free up increase hard disk space.
Jun 11, 2016 6:02AM PDT
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Running out of HD space.
Jun 11, 2016 8:45AM PDT

Ayour operating system needs a certain amount of space to work. If not it will crash.
I would do as others suggested and clean up your HD. There are programmes available to to this. However I would also get an external drive. They are not expensive. Create a " my documents" and " my picture folder" and move all documents and photos to the relevant folder.
You will now have a fairly empty HD.

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No space
Jun 11, 2016 11:14AM PDT

First off, remove 'your' files to another drive.
This being photos, saves, pdf's anything you made, or that are of interest to you. Start with the important stuff first, see how that helps.

Next, check the download folder for things that you don't want, & delete them. If you want them, cut & paste them to another drive.

The other drive can be a large thumb drive (or a few small ones), or external drive. You want to free up your main drive ( being C ).

From there, I'd suggest using defrag (search that in the help and support area).

Defrag isn't great, but it's something.

After turning off the computer or restarting it, you can now look at programs that you no longer use.
Turning the computer off, is always a better option than restart, as the computer will 'forget' what was loaded.

One's goal (for speed/use) is to have 50% of the hard drive free. Difficult to do with programs/software being so bloated.

Now, you can work on the folders MY___. `My pictures', `my music' & so on. If you're not using things in there, remove them (either by deleting them or moving them to another drive).

Those are your more simple things. The more complicated are cleaning the cache, cookies & history.
Most likely the drive is 'just' going to be filled. Certainly age is a factor as well, but try cleaning it up first. Not all uninstalls clean everything up.
Good luck

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Need more space
Jun 11, 2016 1:55PM PDT

Keep your internal as drive 0 and buy a extra external drive and make that drive #1

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Low on hard drive space & stuck
Jun 13, 2016 3:35AM PDT

Hi Jim

I have the same problem with a 'cheap' tablet which had Windows 8.1 on it; but somehow when i upgraded to Windows 10 (which was linked to my laptop) So now, the hard drive space is really low too....but what i did was i used a really big SD card with as much GB on it as i could get and i moved Windows onto it so that when it runs it runs from the SD external memory to try to conserve as much space as possible, so now i can update Windows 10....but i am going to have to get another one that's even bigger soon as it still has low drive space on the original GB of the original drive...but if yours is a laptop and not a tablet, then i'd be checking if you can upgrade the GB on it and take it to a computer place that can advise you what you need to do, as they can maybe offer to increase the original GB's on the computer itself as that will help, but you will need to backup everything important (use an external hard drive, like seagate e.g) Hope this helps Happy

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low on hard drive space and stuck
Jun 13, 2016 3:42AM PDT

meant to say 'i used a SD card with as much GB on it as i could not a 'really big SD card' Happy

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Get a new hard drive!
Jun 13, 2016 7:15AM PDT

If it were me, first thing I would do is get a bigger hard drive. Almost always, if your computer is getting old you can get a new bigger drive for less than the original drive would have cost. For 2.5" format (laptop) mechanical drives well under $100 for 1TB last time I looked. Now use an imaging program like Norton Ghost or Acronis True Image to clone your hard drive. Since it's nearly impossible to do anything before the cows come home on your current OS in its current state, make a bootable medium for Ghost or Acronis on another computer. Use the external drive or NAS you use to do backups (you do backups, right?) to save the image. Take out the old hard drive, put in the new one, then restore, using the option to enlarge the partitions to make use of all the space on the new drive. Now you will have some room to breathe to implement some of the other suggestions here to free up drive space. It should then be a long time, if ever, that you run into the problem on that computer again. You can use the old drive as an external drive with an inexpensive hard drive dock--either nuke the original data once you are set with the new drive, or use it as back up.

Yes I can't emphasize the importance of "back up" as many tales of woe have been told on this forum.

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%temp% Tip
Jun 13, 2016 1:43PM PDT

I tired the "%temp%" by just going to "This PC" page which shows all the hard drives and other main files (I have Windows 8.1) and it went to the temp page:

"C:\Users\gar\AppData\Local\Temp"

Noticed that almost all in that files where "temp" files so I deleted them all. But first I noted how much free space I had on my hard drive which was 9.01 GB Free. After the files were deleted I looked again and there was only 8.65 GB Free. Thought that was strange until I looked in my Recycle Bin and all the files that I deleted (from the %temp% file) were there. Once I deleted all the files from the Recycle Bin and ran defrag I now have 10.4 GB Free. That cleared up 1.39 GB on the hard drive! Have had this computer for about 3 years now and that is a lot on junk files that you don't need on your HD.

The post I read did mentioned the "%temp% but the step it did not say to do is than go to the Recycle Bin and delete all the files from there.

Does anyone know where such info like "%temp%" can be found on the CNET site? It would be nice to just go a page that lists great tips like that.

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System Restore Eats HD space in Win7
Jun 15, 2016 10:44PM PDT

If you have used system restore you may have triggered it to gobble up HD space. Every time you use it it takes morte HD space. THere are also a few apps that trigger this action by making new restore points. One is iobit uninstaller, which works well, but you have to limit the amount of space system restore can use. I went into the system and set the maximum of space it could use at 2% and instantly recovered 467 GIGs on my C drive.

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Look at Windows Error Reporting (WEP) files
Jun 16, 2016 3:18PM PDT

Jim, Sorry this has taken so long. Cnet wouldn't let me log in. Anyway, I had the same problem a while back on my Win 7 PC. The fix for me was to remove the WEP log files. This saved 76 GB on my 500 GB drive. There are several ways to do this but the easiest way is to use the Disk Cleanup program. You might have to run it twice. The first time clean up the regular files. The second time you should see a "Cleanup System files" button. Click this and select "System error report files" and "System error report archives". For now leave the other stuff unchecked.
Some here have suggested defraging. Defraging doesn't save any disk space and you should be aware that defraging wipes out your restore points.

Tim K

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reclaim more storage
Jul 5, 2016 12:59AM PDT

1. Delete unused files
2. Uninstall unused programs
3. Wipe free space

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Clean up your disk!
Jul 5, 2016 3:31PM PDT

I'm sorry that's happening to you. Here's a quick and easy solution to your problem:

On Windows 7/10:
1) Open the "Start" menu (Windows logo) and type in "Disk Cleanup", then press Enter.
2) A menu will pop up, just hit enter again and your computer will find unnecessary files for you.
3) After the green bar has finished, a window will pop up with everything you can delete, but instead of clicking ok, click "Clean up system files"
4) Click "ok" on the new menu. (It looks like it's doing the same thing as before, but it's actually finding old updates and other stuff you'll never need.)
5) Now after the green bar finishes again and the window with everything you can delete comes up, click OK at the bottom of the window and let it do its thing! You get space back.

I hope this guide helped you

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Low on hard-drive space and I'm stuck -- what can I do?
Nov 13, 2016 2:29PM PST

1.) get some USB sticks & start transferring all your music , photo's, video's, documents. See how much space that gives you.
Continue to uninstall programs that you never use.
After that , take each USB stick & upload the contents to Microsoft Onedrive..store your stuff online.
or
2.) Buy a 2.5" SATA Hard drive enclosure + buy a larger 2.5" Laptop Harddrive apx 2TB in size
Put the new hard drive into the enclosure & hook it up to your laptop (USB2-as it won't be USB3 probably- the enclosure should be USB3 but USB2 compatible)- anyway...now download free partition & mirroring software ie- Clonezilla etc... get freeware, it's cheap..free.
- now just clone your laptop's hard drive. Take out your old hard drive & replace it with your new 2TB cloned hard drive.
- boot it up then fire up the free clone software ..then "partition" your new hard drive , adding a second partition that is 1TB in size. Click apply & let the software format your new partition. Now you will have extra storage space with 1 2TB drive that have been partitioned into 2 x 1TB DRIVES.

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All of these comments saying just upgrade. Give this a shot.
Nov 17, 2016 8:35AM PST

OK so first off you want to clear out temp/junk files. The easiest way to do this would be to use CCleaner. It is a small file and you should be good to use it. Follow the link and click on the portable one --- CCleaner Portable

Run both the junk cleaner and the registry cleaner.

After doing this it should clear up a lot of space. Now you need to go in and uninstall any programs that you are no longer using. As this will free up space.

Next I would suggest backing up files that you do not access often to a usb drive or other storage media. Or even purchasing an external hard drive to store all of your files on.

After all of this is done. You should have plenty of free space. Be sure to defragment your drive, run virus scans, update windows, and update any other software you are using to help protect against infection.

I hope this has been helpful and I would very much appreciate it if you were to check out my YouTube Channel. ---- *****

***** Site promotion removed with moderator edit.

Post was last edited on November 17, 2016 9:01 AM PST

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thanks friend
Nov 19, 2016 1:46AM PST

all programs are also already I uninstalled