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Posted: 3/5/2006 2:01:14 PM EDT
[#1]
You're not going to solve your hard drive problem by installing more memory.
What programs are you using that cause it to fill up like this? Are you storing movies, music, pictures, etc??? |
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Posted: 3/5/2006 2:07:10 PM EDT
[#2]
yeah...lots of pictures from the digital camera are stored on it...i think 8 gig or something like that...
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Posted: 3/5/2006 2:08:31 PM EDT
[#3]
Yes, of course, pictures from the digital camera. Not pornography at all. |
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Posted: 3/5/2006 2:10:47 PM EDT
[#4]
An external USB drive would be cheap and easy. Move all the pictures off your internal drive.
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Posted: 3/5/2006 2:10:51 PM EDT
[#5]
Hard to say what you can remove without knowing exactly what's on there. You could start with Add/Remove Programs in Control Panel and it will tell you how much space your apps are taking up and you can uninstall the ones you don't use anymore. Other than that, delete big files that you don't want anymore, like videos. Or you could just buy a new hard drive and install it.
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Posted: 3/5/2006 2:13:41 PM EDT
[#6]
Sam's club had, what I felt, to be a great deal on external HD a short while ago. 250GB, and I think I paid $120. It's Western Digital which by my research has generally favorable reviews. The problem is that when reading reviews on Cnet etc. you will always have the Uber Geek element which will always buck the trend and tell you why Western Digital is the HellSpawn of Hard Drives which will give you pause.
I said "fuck it" and bought it anyways. Works well so far! Nice easy setup, USB connection. I bet they still have it...czech 'em out. |
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Posted: 3/5/2006 2:14:08 PM EDT
[#7]
8GB of pics aren't what's causing your space shortage, that's only 10%. Chances are that you probably have a lot of programs ie: Turbotax, photoshop, autocad, games, microsoft office. Things like that. Most games such as First person shooters are averaging 3-6 gb of hard drive space each! I would suggest that you start looking into Control Panel > Add or Remove Programs, and see what programs are listed and decide which you can afford to get rid of. In that screen it will show you how much hard drive is being used from each program and just start trimming off some fat. That's about the only way to make some room unless you go and pick up another hard drive. You can also get back that 8GB of storage being taken up by your photos by doing the smart thing anyway- Burn them onto some cd's or a couple of DVD disks. God knows my wife would kill me if my hard drive crashed and we lost all of our pictures we'd taken because I didn't back them up on to a disk! Whatever option you choose, don't just go into your C: drive and start deleting things! I've had to fix so many oops mistakes from people who have gone and done just that! Good luck |
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Posted: 3/5/2006 2:14:24 PM EDT
[#8]
First off Im not a computer guy.
You said 8g worth of pics stored, but list 80g HD.  I have a moderate amount of programs, and even with Temp storage I only have 5 G of programs. That leaves you with 65g of a lot of something else if thats the case. I just added a 300g HD to mine, used as storage alone. This time I partitioned it out, and send copies to a backup section. A lot of the computer guys suggested I use an external storage media, I think that would be the best way for anyone to go. Something like this, $100 bucks and an extra 80G. Good luck! |
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Posted: 3/5/2006 2:16:16 PM EDT
[#9]
Defrag and compress what you don't use frequently, install a bigger hard drive if that's possible or neccessary.
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Posted: 3/5/2006 2:19:20 PM EDT
[#10]
add/remove....yeah....biggest program i have is XP professional which is 210MB....maybe there are some other programs on there i can remove.....i guess 7.6GB of pictures/vidoes is a lot perhaps, but just doesnt seem like much based on the number of files i have....oh well...thanks
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Posted: 3/5/2006 2:21:02 PM EDT
[#11]
Have you run anti-virus scans, and scanned for malware? They can eat up space sometimes. I ran across a strange one recently. The guy's HD was virtually full, and I couldn't find any reason for it. He had Norton Internet Security, and it was apparently damaged by a virus. You couldn't even access the Quarantine tab of the program w/o it locking up.
To make a long boring story short, somehow, that quarantine file grew to 12GB (!). After unsuccesfully trying to uninstall Norton, I used the brute force method, and got it out. Poof, 12GB (nearly half the drive space) came back. So consider checking for such things. Also delete your temp files, recycle bin, browser history (Internet Exploder is infamous for hogging huge amounts of space), and your System restore points (if using XP). |
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Posted: 3/5/2006 2:24:02 PM EDT
[#12]
Try this , it works great....really.Old thread
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Posted: 3/5/2006 2:25:21 PM EDT
[#13]
SOmething making me suspicious.
You have 8 gigs of pics (vids too?) and XP pro is only taking up 210mb? That don't add up anywhere near 80 gigs....... |
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Posted: 3/5/2006 2:26:25 PM EDT
[#14]
Is Windows telling you that you are running low on disk space or what is the symptom? Sounds like something funny is going on. |
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Posted: 3/5/2006 2:27:41 PM EDT
[#15]
yes, windows is telling me that i'm running low on disk space...
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Posted: 3/5/2006 2:59:20 PM EDT
[#16]
Try the "Windows Cleanup" or whatever it is. Devote less space to cache.
The easy way to deal with this is just to get another disk. It's not worth your precious time trying to figure out what to delete, and dealing with the consequences of deleting something you didn't want to. Quality disk space is only about $2/GB. Just get another disk. Also, don't forget to backup. All disks fail eventually. Don't lose your pics. |
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Posted: 3/5/2006 3:07:29 PM EDT
[#17]
I recently picked up a 160GB Seagate for $80. |
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Posted: 3/5/2006 3:24:28 PM EDT
[#18]
Start with Add/Remove programs. Get rid of anything you don't use, or don't think you'll use.
Next, go to Start > Accessories > System Tools >Disk Cleanup. That will bring up a window showing different catagories of files you can delete. Check them all and let it do it's job. It may take a while, if there's a lot of cached files and such. Go to the same place above, and choose Disk Defragmenter, and let it defragment your hard drive. You should do this every couple months. The external hard drive suggestion is a good one. Make copies of things you would not want to lose (like your pictures and such). You could move data that is not very critical to the external drive, and just fire it up when you need to access it. Otherwise leave it off. Buying a new computer easier? That's like saying 'my car is dirty, would it be easier to buy a new one?'. A computer is a lot like a car. There are maintenance practices that need to be done, and unfortunately, they are not widely known by average users. Most users think they can just turn the computer on and surf away with no problems. Nowadays, you need a firewall, antivirus program, spyware removers... running a computer is an active involvement, and if you're not active in keeping it healthy, it can get ugly, and be VERY difficult to fix. |
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Posted: 3/5/2006 3:37:57 PM EDT
[#19]
I got the 300G Seagate for $60 after rebate. |
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Posted: 3/5/2006 4:23:18 PM EDT
[#20]
Yep. Six months ago I bought a 120 gig Western Digital external USB 2.0 drive that ended up being something like $60 after rebates. Fantastic for backups and picture storage. You can also buy a decent second drive to install into the computer. I'm not familiar with Compaq, but as long as it isn't a laptop you should have space inside for a second drive. Go ahead and get a 200 or 300 gig drive, partition it into a couple or three drives, format, and start transferring files over. One way to rapidly clean up the drive is to run CCleaner. It frees up a lot of space by deleting temp files, and can clean up the registry too. You can usually delete or archive (burn to DVD if you must) the Windows Update Uninstall files in your windows directory. I generally kill those as soon as I'm sure the system is stable after an update. Jim |
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Posted: 3/5/2006 4:38:30 PM EDT
[#21]
Hard drives at newegg.com get a seagate or western digital. If you want to go crazy get a western digital raptor with 10000rpms of speed(not the 36gb version) and see how fast your computer is. Get rid of all the extra crap programsm that came with your compaq. I also recommend CCleaner (stands for crap cleaner) to free up temp and log files that you dont need, its free. Installing a new hard drive is easy if you have extra IDE or SATA ports. Just plug and run. Might want to get external HD if your not comfortable cracking open your computer case.
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Posted: 3/6/2006 12:49:13 AM EDT
[#22]
The figure I quoted is for redundant, high-availibility, decent performance storage, and it includes the cost of supporting hardware. In other words, by "quality," I mean storage that won't crap out and crash your system or lose all of your data randomly every few years. Since it includes supporting hardware, just multiply by any amount of storage you want, and it gives you a basically accurate ballpark figure. It doesn't include power usage or manpower, though. If you're paying significantly less than this, you need to be willing to lose all of your data since your last backup. This isn't a remote risk; its something that will happen perhaps a few years after your warranty runs out, and very often before. The MTBF for cheap ATAPI disks is only a few years. Some people don't really care about the data on their computer, and some people are insane about backing up often. Everyone else who doesn't have the above-mentioned sort of storage is just playing with fire. |
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Posted: 3/6/2006 1:06:22 AM EDT
[#23]
There's a whole bunch of stuf in c:\windows you can get rid of, but I would highly recmomend getting a more computer savvy mate to do it for you.
Desktops and the isntall filse for Windows patches eat up a shedload of space. Try this piece of software to identify where exactly the disk space is being used: www.download.com/TreeSize-Free/3000-2248_4-10446555.html?tag=lst-0-1 It wont tell you what's safe to delete but at least you can get rid of it. Also, you can try turning off System Restore, that takes a shed load of space up My Computer Right Click Properties System Restore Turn Off System Restore That's probably a coupla gigs right there HTH /PHil |
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Posted: 3/6/2006 1:17:25 AM EDT
[#24]
Do you use any file sharing programs, like Limewire or bearshare??? I was filling up my HD really fast and couldn't figure it out, I movie all my movie and music to a new HD and still had something that was filling up the drive. It turned out to be the incomplete downloads from limewire. Like if I selected abunch of things to download and then let it run for a while, some of the files would lose the connection and not be able to find another copy of the file anywhere else and it would just sit there taking up space. I think it was between 10-15gigs before I figured it out. Now I have it set to keep unfinished downloads for a day.
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Posted: 3/6/2006 1:27:49 AM EDT
[#25]
That's a nifty little program. I've been looking for a program that could do that since I lost the one I had back when I used Dos 3.2. Thanks! Jim |
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Posted: 3/6/2006 1:30:55 AM EDT
[#26]
Once you start storing music and especially photo/video, not to mention game savs, 80 gb fills up fast. While an external is a great thing for security and portability, it is slow compared to the internal bus speed.
You can get a 200 gig internal HDD form Best Buy, Staples or CompUSA for about $60 (watch the sale ads), your computer should already be ready to have it installed, and the added benefit is your OS and programs will be on a different drive than your files in case of crash or virus. For further info, post in the Urban Commando forum and get advice from the uber-geeks.  |
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Posted: 3/6/2006 1:33:26 AM EDT
[#27]
I've picked up 300 gb Sata 3Gs (both Maxtor and Seagate) from various suppliers for $125 lately. |
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Posted: 3/6/2006 11:19:47 AM EDT
[#28]
update:
alrighty then....thanks all ! I purchased an external hard drive today and dumped all my digital photo's, videos, etc. on there and ran the CCleaner program several of you recommended and ended up freeing about 16 GB of whatever off my hard so i guess i'm back in business for the moment. being somewhat computer illiterate, i guess i didnt do to bad....  |
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