What's the best thing to do when my hard drive fills up?

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I would like to "add" that this is probably a good time to figure out what files are residing on your harddrive. Not just the ones that take up large amounts of space.
It's easy to just keep on storing stuff on a HD (especially today's hugeass ones), but ask yourself this: do you know everything that's on yer HD? Probably not.

It's like a filing cabinet and personally I like to know what's in it and how to quickly find it (and yes there is windows search, but that's just an excuse for leaving your mess the way it is ;-)

Take the time to properly organize it and not alone will you save space, you might also find some hidden treasures (ok, maybe not ;-)

In any case, just buying an extra HD to store more stuff on (like many people do) is, in my opinion, not the best way to start...

sometimes your temp files and recycle bin hold a lot of leftover files running CCleaner (freeware) in some cases will free up a couple of GB. If he plays games some games take up a lot of space. Consider uninstalling some games he hasn't played in a while. He can always reinstall them later. Ang an external HD is alway a good idea for backups and you can move music, videos and photos etc.

Hello, I cannot receive any emails larger than 1MB but am able to receive emails less than 1MB. The email delivery statement reads that my mail box is full and cannot receive any emails. I just got done deleting all of my old emails. So my inbox should be almost empty. Could you please help me and let me know what I can d in order to fix this problem.

Thanks,
Mark Orr

Sorry for the confusion, I meant to say that I could not receive any emails over 10MB. Is there a size limit on incoming emails. Please let me know.

Mark Orr

My understanding is that the Internet Service Provider (ISP, e.g.: Earthlink, ATT, Roadrunner) determines the size of the e-mails allowed. 10MB is a VERY large attachment. I'd question why you need to do this.

I agree with Vincent that the first step in the process is to determine what is taking up so much space. To fill up a newer computer's disk space (e.g. over 40GB) says to me that you should do some housekeeping.

The one possible solution that I was hoping to see was not considered. My wife's computer is old but adequate. The problem is the 19GB HD has been filled up with pictures and other things important to her. I have Ccleaner and do regular maintenance on it. I DO have a 350GB external drive connected to it and have an image back-up program doing daily incremental back-ups. That has tons of space BUT...to keep things simple for her, I'd like to replace the internal 19GB drive with a new, larger drive. I'm hoping that doing it is simply just changing the internal drive and doing an image restore, but these things are not clear to me in the back-up software documentation. I use Acronis.

I just wanted to make a couple of suggestions since I run into this problem often with my customers' pc's. Treesize Free is a great freeware program for finding out what's taking up space on your hard drive. Also, most people are familiar with Windows Disk Cleanup, but don't notice the 'More Options' tab. After you initially run Disk Cleanup, click on this tab and click on 'System Restore' at the bottom to delete all but the last restore point. The problem here is: MAKE SURE your pc is running just the way you want it because you won't have 'Restore my pc to an earlier time' option anymore, until more restore points are made. This usually clears up 5 to 11 gigabytes on my computer every time. Good Luck!

Could you discuss freeware and shareware that seeks and deletes duplicate files on the Hard Drives? I have multiple copies of photographs mostly created by trying different photo editing programs that automatically created duplicates. The programs sound good, but I read some "horror stories" on forums saying running these programs could be dangerous.

Ok, Leo, there is one other way to free up drive space that you didn't mention. First, stop the restore function and second set it to half of the settings it is currenty set too. THEN, DO A SET RESTORE POINT. I only have 500 MB of storage and that gives me a few days of restore which has been plenty, If I need to restore it. That will free up gigs of drive space.

Charlie Pelot

A good freeware program to visually see what files are taking up space is WinDirStat. Each file shows up as a rectangle, and its size depends on the size of the file, so you can easily pick out those huge files that are taking up all the space.

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