Help (again!) - trying to free up laptop hard drive
 

Our student daughter has come to visit us this weekend, mothers day ;)

She brought her old Toshiba laptop which is full to the gunnels with stuff so much so that it hardly works properly any more. I went out and bought an external hard drive (320 GB) and told her to move stuff over to that. She said she had a lot of music but that was only about 8 GB and even moving general documents, deleting temp files and cache and it still has a pile of data clogging things up which we can't identify. It also seems to have an in-built additional hard drive but I haven't a clue what that is for, perhaps for recovery? Main drive has things like Skype, Kaspersky and programmes like that but I don't think any of them are multi GB.

It's Toshiba Satellite pro 100 with 80 GB hard drive which rather dates it but it is her life blood for work, play and communication so what do you suggest we do next please? Answers urgently on a post card as she returns tomorrow :)

Many thanks, David

seeing as it's all backed up , just do a clean install of windows :thumb:

My old Acer had an 80gb hdd partitioned in to two 40gb sections C and D. If you click start and then computer you should be able to see the hard drive and how much is used. On mine it would keep warning me that the disk was full so I had to shift a load of stuff from the C partition to the D partition and that solved it.
I have a HP desktop which the hard drive is partitioned in to two but this has a small partition of about 5gb which is just the recovery section.

Look at the hard drive split first. Start > computer.

easeus partition master will let you change size of your partitions eg taking from d and giving to c look up on net may help has some manufacturers just divide them 50/50 and when you have finnished deleting do a defrag

Thanks guys - that's a great start. Quick replies much appreciated. David

Back it all up and just run the recovery programme, will be like day one again, job done. :)

Google a program called tree size, and choose the free version, download and install this.
It will graphically show you where the space is been taken up

Richard

Thanks again folks. The laptop is now usable again and the TreeSize software was interesting (I had a practice on my own PC).

I think the biggest pain was not knowing that the hard drive was split into two. So we thought we had 80 GB to play with but in effect only had 40 GB. How is a non-pc type supposed to know that!!

Cheers, David