Question: Clogged hard drive. Help!!!!

[Foxfyre]

Okay, Hombre's computer is an older computer that we had built. He only uses it for web surfing, e-mail, playing internet games, Face Book, managing his duties as chair of his HS reunin committee, and geneology.

It has an 80 gig harddrive which is small this day and age but should be plenty large for what he does with the computer.

As of this morning the harddrive was full--79+ gigs.

His my documents folder is at 9 gigs due to all the photos he has in it.

The Windows folder is at 55+ gigs which seems really high.

What do I do?

 

[Oddball]

Emptied your temp file cache yet?

 

[Warrior102]

C:format

 

[peach174]

You have to make copies of what is stored.
Empty your cookies.
Empty stored up e-mails
Mostly it might be the games.
Get rid of games or copy them, that has not been played for a long time.
The newer games use a lot of hard drive storage.

 

[edthecynic]

Add a second hard drive.

 

[Foxfyre]

You have to make copies of what is stored.
Empty your cookies.
Empty stored up e-mails
Mostly it might be the games.
Get rid of games or copy them, that has not been played for a long time.
The newer games use a lot of hard drive storage.

He has very few games on the hard drive--most that he plays are internet games. Those that are on the hard drive take up way less than a gig of space. (I already checked that. )

 

[Foxfyre]

Emptied your temp file cache yet?

No, but would that (and/or the cookies and/or the history) take up a huge amount of gig space? As soon as the deep virus scan I have going is complete, I will do that though.

 

[Oddball]

Back when I had Windoze 98, I had to go into the program files to dig up the temporary internet files cache that had eaten up all my hard drive space....YMMV.

 

[Skull Pilot]

Cloud storage.

 

[Foxfyre]

Cloud storage.

What is that. I am about as techie as a tree stump, so keep it simple please.

 

[peach174]

Emptied your temp file cache yet?

No, but would that (and/or the cookies and/or the history) take up a huge amount of gig space? As soon as the deep virus scan I have going is complete, I will do that though.

Yes

 

[MikeK]

Google up and download a program called CCleaner. It's free, small, uncomplicated and amazingly effective. And you'll be pleasantly surprised at the amount of space it will free up.

I'm a computer dummy but I had absolutely no trouble getting and using CCleaner. It's quick and simple.

 

[Foxfyre]

Back when I had Windoze 98, I had to go into the program files to dig up the temporary internet files cache that had eaten up all my hard drive space....YMMV.

I don't think that is it. The program files only show a very few gigs. It's the Windows folder that seems to be clogged.

 

[bobcollum]

I would personally either burns a few dvds of the pics and other documents that are taking up so much space, or I'd get a little external drive to store them on. I'd actually definitely go with an external drive.

 

[peach174]

Cloud storage.

What is that. I am about as techie as a tree stump, so keep it simple please.

It's an online data storage service, you have to pay for it.

 

[Foxfyre]

Google up and download a program called CCleaner. It's free, small, uncomplicated and amazingly effective. And you'll be pleasantly surprised at the amount of space it will free up.

I'm a computer dummy but I had absolutely no trouble getting and using CCleaner. It's quick and simple.

I have Systems Mechanic on that computer which is much the same kind of program. Will run that when the deep virus scan I have going is completed. The disk is so full, however, that it is taking forever to do anything on the computer. Fortunately we backed up his program files a few days ago, so we won't lose anything critical if the whole thing crashes.

 

[bobcollum]

Google up and download a program called CCleaner. It's free, small, uncomplicated and amazingly effective. And you'll be pleasantly surprised at the amount of space it will free up.

I'm a computer dummy but I had absolutely no trouble getting and using CCleaner. It's quick and simple.

I have Systems Mechanic on that computer which is much the same kind of program. Will run that when the deep virus scan I have going is completed. The disk is so full, however, that it is taking forever to do anything on the computer. Fortunately we backed up his program files a few days ago, so we won't lose anything critical if the whole thing crashes.

Chances are the slowness you're experiencing has everything to do with the drive being nearly maxed out. Just burn or transfer and delete 10 gigs or so and you should see a return to normal.

 

[Foxfyre]

Google up and download a program called CCleaner. It's free, small, uncomplicated and amazingly effective. And you'll be pleasantly surprised at the amount of space it will free up.

I'm a computer dummy but I had absolutely no trouble getting and using CCleaner. It's quick and simple.

I have Systems Mechanic on that computer which is much the same kind of program. Will run that when the deep virus scan I have going is completed. The disk is so full, however, that it is taking forever to do anything on the computer. Fortunately we backed up his program files a few days ago, so we won't lose anything critical if the whole thing crashes.

Chances are the slowness you're experiencing has everything to do with the drive being nearly maxed out. Just burn or transfer and delete 10 gigs or so and you should see a return to normal.

But the 10 gigs or so I need to delete is apparently in the Windows Folder--that alone is taking up 55 gigs of the 74 available on the C drive--and it comes with a severe warning not to mess with the files in that folder.

 

[ekrem]

But the 10 gigs or so I need to delete is apparently in the Windows Folder--that alone is taking up 55 gigs of the 74 available on the C drive--and it comes with a severe warning not to mess with the files in that folder.

In which sub-folder of Windows-Folder?
And do you have just some very big files in that folder, or many thousands?
If it is small number of files what are their filenames?
Windows folder shouldn't be 55 GB big, there's definately something wrong in there.

 

[ekrem]

Try a tool like this to locate the very big files:
SpaceSniffer, find lost disk space the easy way.