disc space advice

[Justin Holl]

hey guys on my laptop, i have a 160gb harddrive which is in 2 partitions 1#local 2#recovery i am wondering where alot of the usage from the local disc is gone i dont have too much installed and only like 30gb maybe of files i.e music etc. im jus asking if any1 would know where alot of the usage may be and can i delete them to make more room? thanks

[basroil]

a 160"gb" is really about 149gb, closer to 145-148 depending on file systems and such. Your recovery partition, assuming it's a dell, is 8gb. that means about 140gb for everything else.

From there, 4gb will be the OS+backup files for the OS. depending on the programs you have, you could have between 2gb (on the low side), to about 50gb (or more) in program files. In a light install (adobe cs master+ office+chat programs, firefox, standard microsoft files), that's another 9gb. Your page file will be another 1gb-4gb (assume 2.5 in the standard core 2 laptop), and hibernation file is the size of your ram (lets say another 2gb). that means the 148gb starting thing went down to just 124gb before you even touch it. Add in temporary files, program data, internet cache, and your free space keeps going down.

Best solution is to get an external HDD. Even cheap pocket drives can have enough space.

[Josh_30]

What does it say you're down to at the moment? Basroil pretty much covered all of the junk I can think of that eats up hard drive space before you even touch the new PC. Windows reports HDD space differently than companies market the capacity of their drives... so you'll never get the reported capacity from any drive, which sucks.

Externals are the easiest solution to getting all of the stuff you want to keep off of your HDD while keeping it easily accessible.

Try deleting a lot of the programs you'll never use that come packaged on a new PC. If there are quite a few of them, that could free up a significant amount of space.

[Justin Holl]

yeh. i have i external harddrive (****ty small 1) upgrading to 1tb soon which will be good.
would i be better of doing a recovery to factory settings, with my hp laptop but can u choose to not install the programs that are included? would this save alot of room

[Justin Holl]

uhm my lightroom 2 is running slow for some odd reason
how can i fix this? my laptop specs are
intel core 2 duo 1.73ghz
2gb ram
nvidea 7400go
and i have about 70gb left on my harddrive space

any wyas i can fix this

[basroil]

uhm my lightroom 2 is running slow for some odd reason
how can i fix this? my laptop specs are
intel core 2 duo 1.73ghz
2gb ram
nvidea 7400go
and i have about 70gb left on my harddrive space

any wyas i can fix this

If it's a dell, you can try swapping the processor for a faster one, but other than that, you're out of luck. Best you can do is to clear out old temp files, unused programs, make sure AV is up to date, and delete old previews.

[tim]

Some brands put hidden recovery and backup stuff on the hard drive. I just cleaned my assistants IBM up, it had something like 40GB of backups in hidden files that took me AGES to find. I have it documented on another forum, if anyone wants to know I can go find it.

[Mike]

uhm my lightroom 2 is running slow for some odd reason
how can i fix this? my laptop specs are
intel core 2 duo 1.73ghz
2gb ram
nvidea 7400go
and i have about 70gb left on my harddrive space

any wyas i can fix this

Run ccleaner to get rid of all the hidden junk on your drive. Also, have a look at your lightroom catalog folder - you'll be surprised at how big it is. I just deleted mine on one of my laptops and it freed up a few gigs of space!

[tim]

Doesn't the LR catalog hold all the settings for all the modifications for all your files? Deleting caches is ok, but be careful what you delete.

[Mike]

Ah, yes, it probably does. I stopped using this laptop as a processing machine now which is why I deleted the folder.

[hollis_f]

Treesize (http://www.jam-software.com/freeware/index.shtml)is a good app for telling you just where all that space has gone.

[tim]

Treesize (http://www.jam-software.com/freeware/index.shtml)is a good app for telling you just where all that space has gone.

In the case I was talking about the files taking the space were system files and weren't visible to the user, so weren't visible to treesize either.

[hollis_f]

In the case I was talking about the files taking the space were system files and weren't visible to the user, so weren't visible to treesize either.

Not without putting Windows into the 'Stop treating me like a moronic lttle kid' mode. One of the first things I do with each new PC is to tell Windows that I do want to see file extensions, hidden files and system files and I don't care how dangerous it is.

[René Damkot]

Doesn't the LR catalog hold all the settings for all the modifications for all your files? Deleting caches is ok, but be careful what you delete.

Depending on how often you have LR set to backup the catalog, you might also have quite a bit of disk space that's lost to old (useless) backup catalogs...

[basroil]

Depending on how often you have LR set to backup the catalog, you might also have quite a bit of disk space that's lost to old (useless) backup catalogs...

Don't forget old previews too. I have LR backup every week, and in just a few months, I had about 6gb of backup catalog files and about 18gb of previews... yea, it gets a bit out of hand.

[tim]

Not without putting Windows into the 'Stop treating me like a moronic lttle kid' mode. One of the first things I do with each new PC is to tell Windows that I do want to see file extensions, hidden files and system files and I don't care how dangerous it is.

That's incorrect, if file permissions don't let you see the files or folders treesize can't count their size. If they're in a folder off the root directory that you don't have permission to see you're stuffed. What you've done is a good first step though. This is Vista btw, XP might not be so strong on file permissions, i'm not sure.

The pages that resolved the situation for the machine I was fixing are here (http://forums.lenovo.com/lnv/board/message?board.id=T_Series_Thinkpads&thread.id=11758) and here (http://forums.lenovo.com/lnv/board/message?board.id=Special_Interest_Utilities&thread.id=311).

[MaxxuM]

CCleaner (free) will take some of the effort out of looking for all the caches for you as well as empty history folders. Remember to check "Old Prefetch Files" too - it may even help a little with speed issues as well.