Freeing hard drive space?

This is probally easier than I can imagine at this momemt..
My computer keeps popping up and saying "you have less than the recomended space on acer-c.."
I seem to have 2 hard drives, both 15gig. One reads full the other empty. I need to move a program or two over to the other HD, and I don't know how, more importantly I need my computer to keep sending relavent info to that HD. For instance, if I move my pictures to the other HD how do I make my computer keep sending pictures to that file instead of where it usually does?
Does this make sense? I need help..

Well if your pictures are being put in "My Pictures", that's no doubt in the "My Documents" folder. My Documents, and everything it contains, will move itself. Right click on My Documents, then click Properties. Then you can click Move. It will allow you to specify where to move it.

Before you do this, you might want to see what others here have to say. Given you situation though, it seems like a good idea.

There are other things you can do to free up space. You can move your "swap file" a.k.a. pagefile.sys to the other drive, but you may not have to, if you move "my documents".

Sometimes people forget to empty the recycle bin. Check it out.

You can run a disk cleanup. One of the things this can do is remove all but the latest System Restore point. Right click on the C disk and click Properties > Disk Cleanup. To remove the excess restore points you can then click the "More Options" tab.

Moving programs is more difficult. Most programs are "installed" and have entries in the registry. To move most of these, I think you would have to uninstall them, and then re-install them.

In the future, if you wanted, you could certainly install programs on the other drive. Almost all installers, and all of the "good" installers, give you this option. You can install programs anywhere. You could make a folder for this on the second drive. Call it what you want. But again, if you move most of your data, you may not need to do this.

Someday you'll want to buy a bigger hard drive and send your old ones to the Smithsonian.

If the only copy of the pictures is on one hard drive, you are going to lose them all someday. You may not want to do anything until you replace the second drive with a bigger one.

Even that won't solve the problem because they will still be stored in only one place.

You can back up the pictures on an external hard drive, on CDs or on DVDs.
You could get two larger internal drives to replace the ones you have, but you'll have a bit of a time doing that and getting the pictures on the new drives.

They didn't tell you about this stuff when they sold you that computer, did they?

And I'll bet they didn't tell you about this stuff when they sold you the camera either.

So I can move the "My Documents"? I am getting this error every other keystroke.

Okay, heres one method
Burn stuff to DVD-RWs and CD-RWs, and if you like a better apporach, check if your DVD/CD writer supports a special format called "DVD-RAM" (What my laptop does, not my desktop)
DVD-RAM = Treated like a harddrive basically
Other than that, delete stuff or compress it

Some programs have a default location to save data to in preferences or options etc while others prompt you for where you save your files to and choosing the second drive once and not changing locations will keep sending your saved files there. If you have any large programs that take several gigs of space just for the program itself you may consider uninstalling them and reinstalling them onto the second drive. Another alternative is to also point to the second drive for your swap file usage.
If you have a lot of pictures and audio files you may consider looking into converting them to a compressed format if possible such as mp3,wma etc and jpeg for pictures, it is amazing how much space I saved by converting my pictures to jpg with about 10% loss (which was unnoticable 99% of the time). You can save up to 90% space converting to compressed format. If you have a lot of tiny files you may consider an archive such as zip arj 7z etc as each tiny file takes one cluster each and a million of them can take up a lot of room and also increase search time across your drive.

Pydpiper said:

So I can move the "My Documents"? I am getting this error every other keystroke.

Click to expand...

I see you are in panic mode. Yes you can move My Documents.
Right click on it. Click Properties > Move. Navigate to your other drive. You'll have to figure it out from there cuz I ain't going to move my "My Documents" just to give you the instructions

The other quick thing is to right click on your C disk and click Properties > Disk Cleanup. It will probably find you can gain some space by removing Temporary Internet Files, and maybe some other things. You can probably gain considerably more space by clicking on the "More Options" tab and click on the "Cleanup" button for "System Restore".

The thing that would trouble me about moving the pictures over to the other drive is you probably don't know if it's working. Personally I would run a hard drive diagnostic on it, but you probably don't have one handy. At least I would run a disk scan. Right click on the drive. Click Properties > Tools > Check Now.

If you happen to have "hibernate" enabled, you can instantly free up a lot of disk space by disabling it.

Thanks, I will turn off the Hibernate feature.. The computer instantly goes to "clean-up" and takes care of that for me, then the remove programs window pops up, but I use all of those programs..
It doesn't make sense to me how I can have a 15Gig HD that I can't use..

Apparently the automatic disk cleanup doesn't remove old system restore points. If so, you may free up more space by using the procedure I described earlier for removing all but the most recent restore point.

You can, and should, use the second drive. I'm just not sure how you want to use it.

I'm concerned that with only one copy of your pictures you are one glitch away from losing them.

One thing you can do is copy your pictures to the second drive. I would make a folder on the second drive called Backup, and copy either your "My Pictures" folder or your "My Documents" folder to it. Your choice. Copying "My Documents" will make a backup of your pictures and anything else included in "My Documents".

I like to copy by getting two Windows Explorer windows showing on my screen. One showing the source folder and the other showing the destination. I make them small enough that I can see most of each simultaneously. Then I drag and drop using the right mouse button, because using the right button will give a menu for copy, move, or cancel, and the left button won't.

Another way requires just one windows explorer. Right click on the folder you want to copy and click on "Copy". Navigate to the backup folder on the D disk, right click, and click "Paste".

Do you need a tutorial on this?

By the way, how big is your "My Pictures" folder? To find out, right click on it and click Properties.

Do you have a CD burner?

Actually you don't have to put your pictures in "My Pictures" and you don't have to put your documents etc. in "My Documents". Most programs should allow you to put them anywhere. But because "My Pictures" is the default location for pictures, it's probably easier to use it.

My pictures is 10.8gig, I think that is my main problem
I think I understand the moving of the folder by copying it first, I am going to try that..
I may need some assistance prior to deleting the originals if that is ok..
Thank you.

Clearing out your browser's cache will free up some space also.

PhotonWrangler said:

Clearing out your browser's cache will free up some space also.

Click to expand...

Not as much as you might like IE has this really bad habit of chewing up disk space for cache, and then losing track of or abandoning it, so even if you tell IE to get rid of it, it forgot it ever had it. This seems to happen almost everytime you upgrade the browser.

I've seen systems that had lost several hundred mb of storage this way. The fix is usually to go in and find the cache directors and get rid of them.

The worst thing that happens if you dispose of the cached stuff for a browser is the images have to reloaded off the 'net', which just slows things down.

In addition many programs after installing leaving a lot of pieces around from the installation process, especially if it failed. look for files with a .tmp suffix, or start with ~.

Pydpiper said:

My pictures is 10.8gig, I think that is my main problem
I think I understand the moving of the folder by copying it first, I am going to try that..
I may need some assistance prior to deleting the originals if that is ok..
Thank you.

Click to expand...

I hope I didn't confuse you. The last suggestion was to make a copy of your pictures on the second drive. Then you would have them in both places. If either drive died, you would still have the pictures.

The first suggestion I gave, and then hedged on, was instructions of how to move the "My Documents" folder to the second drive. My Documents is special. I don't understand it exactly but it's some kind of shortcut to the actual folder. To move it, you do as I said in the first post. Again the reason that makes me nervous is because if you move it, you still only have one copy. If the second drive happens to be bad, well, I don't want to be responsible if all is lost.

10.8 GB would fit on three DVDs. I think you can get a good DVD burner for under $50. I guess Lite-On is supposed to be the best. A have a nice Sony that I understand is actually made by Lite-On.

If you had them backed up, then I would definitely suggest you move (not copy) My Documents to the second drive, using the built-in procedure for moving it. This would free up all kinds of space on the first.

Now that I think about it, your second drive would then be 2/3 full. Unless you have given up on photography you are going to need a bigger drive soon. And please don't get a video camera.

You might want to try running CCleaner on your system. It removes unused log files and lots of other 'dead' entries that can consume a lot of space. It's freeware and runs very quickly.

http://www.ccleaner.com/download125.asp