My daughter was dismayed that her fairly-new notebook computer had just 6GB of free disk space. I looked at it, and found these reasons for it being nearly full:
- I was shocked to see the 15" HP notebook's hard drive was just 120GB capacity. Even netbooks come with 160GB drives. I wonder how I overlooked that spec when I bought the computer for her.
- About 1/3 of the space was taken up by MP3 music files.
I began poking about, and eventually got 30GB of free disk space. Here are the steps I took:
1. Ran CCleaner to hunt down and erase unnecessary files. Savings: about 1GB.
2. Ran Windows' own Disc Cleanup utility. There I found that hibernate was reserving 2GB of disk space, which it uses to store an image of the 2GB RAM. I find hibernate painfully slow; I eliminated the reserved space. Savings: 2GB.
3. Ran Uninstall to get rid of unnecessary software, in particular a 30-day version of Adobe's InDesign, Illustrator, and PhotoShop. Savings: about 1.5GB.
4. Used Windows Explorer to check for unnecessary files, particularly large ones, such as three install folders for OpenOffice. Savings: about 2.5GB.
So now the hard drive had about 13GB free. I knew that drives could be compressed, but with the advent of huge, cheap drives, I hadn't seen the need to implement this feature left over from the days of DOS. (Anyone remember Stacker?)
I turned on the Compress feature, but was pessimistic. So many files today already are compressed, such as JPEGs used for digital camera images and MP3s used for music. I figured it might save 1%.
The process was long, with the predicted time to completion jumping wildly between 5 hours and 2.5 days. I started it late in the evening so that the computer could spend all night on the job. In the morning, it was done, and I was pleasantly shocked to find that the disk now had 30GB free.
My daughter was happy, too.
- I was shocked to see the 15" HP notebook's hard drive was just 120GB capacity. Even netbooks come with 160GB drives. I wonder how I overlooked that spec when I bought the computer for her.
- About 1/3 of the space was taken up by MP3 music files.
I began poking about, and eventually got 30GB of free disk space. Here are the steps I took:
1. Ran CCleaner to hunt down and erase unnecessary files. Savings: about 1GB.
2. Ran Windows' own Disc Cleanup utility. There I found that hibernate was reserving 2GB of disk space, which it uses to store an image of the 2GB RAM. I find hibernate painfully slow; I eliminated the reserved space. Savings: 2GB.
3. Ran Uninstall to get rid of unnecessary software, in particular a 30-day version of Adobe's InDesign, Illustrator, and PhotoShop. Savings: about 1.5GB.
4. Used Windows Explorer to check for unnecessary files, particularly large ones, such as three install folders for OpenOffice. Savings: about 2.5GB.
So now the hard drive had about 13GB free. I knew that drives could be compressed, but with the advent of huge, cheap drives, I hadn't seen the need to implement this feature left over from the days of DOS. (Anyone remember Stacker?)
I turned on the Compress feature, but was pessimistic. So many files today already are compressed, such as JPEGs used for digital camera images and MP3s used for music. I figured it might save 1%.
The process was long, with the predicted time to completion jumping wildly between 5 hours and 2.5 days. I started it late in the evening so that the computer could spend all night on the job. In the morning, it was done, and I was pleasantly shocked to find that the disk now had 30GB free.
My daughter was happy, too.
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