I’ve been struggling for a few months with space on my notebook. XP has a nice emergency clean-up facility to do stuff (deleting temp files, compressing stuff), but bottom line, I’ve got space issues.
Digging a bit deeper, and using some downloaded disk scanners, I’ve managed to clean off enough bits to go from 150Mb to over 5Gb free (on my 60Gb drive). I burned some large video files to disk, deleted installation files, goods tuff like that. The effort also included deleting some old Outlook Express mail folders, and my CoH Test server installation (from the CoV beta). That should help. For a while.
Problem is, I know where a huge chunk of the space is going:
- I have many, many, many Gb of MP3 files. Basically, our whole CD collection. Nothing to be done about that without some major strategic planning. Maybe a small external drive (that I could carry with me) to dump the music to and then plug it in when I wanted it.
- I have many Gb of digital photos, too. Some of this is duplicated here and there, and I need to spend an afternoon archiving stuff to disc and cleaning up the rest. Maybe Friday. Hah.
But I seem to be working for the nonce, so that’s all good.
On the off-chance you don’t already know about it, I’ll mention my fondness for CCleaner (Crap Cleaner) which does a fine job of helping to clear out a lot of the junk files that you inevitably build up on your PC over time. Also will do some minor Registry fixes and cleanup. Using that utility on some over full drives has seen as much as 25% of space freed up in some instances.
Granted, I now have the super-shiny laptastical laptop, with lots of space, but when I was running out on my old one, I found that the thing to do with all my MP3s was put them on an external hard drive that I pretty much kept plugged in all the time. Now, granted, this does you no good if you’re traveling around with your laptop and want to play music through it, but I find my iPod works wonders in just having 4 GB of space for music. I don’t need to have ALL my music available all the time.
I’ll take a look at it, Les.
Kate, if I listened to my music more, having an iPod would be great. I only listen to it occasionally, but now that I have all our CDs burned, I don’t want to lost that collection. I do think an external HD would work well.
Though … isn’t there a 60Gb iPod now? Hmmmmm?
Well, CCleaner took care of 267Mb — nothing to sneeze at, certainly. It would have done more if I hadn’t already done so much cleaning through other means. And, so far, my PC hasn
In the off chance that CC missed it, you can remove the uninstall files at the top of the Windows directory. Those are basically from MS patches and you don’t use them anymore. Burn them to a CD if you just like to keep that sort of thing but I routinely nuke them.
Well, that was good for another 200Mb or so. Thanks.