Managing your hard drive space.

Hey all,

I'm sure that you've had this problem. You've had your computer for a few months or more and it just does not have that new computer feel to it. It seems slower, more sluggish, and It seems to crash more often. There are a number of reasons for this. Most of them have to do with your hard drive, the part of your computer that holds all of your files.
Before I start, I should tell you, I'm not here to sell you a product. I'm writing this to give you some free advice on keeping your hard disk in tip top shape. So, lets begin.

The long and short of it is that the hard disk is getting full; or more precisely, your system partition is getting full (or C: drive). Let's take a look at a typical system set up:

I'm sure you have seen this before. This is a picture of the "Computer" window. You can find it in the right hand list of of options on you start menu. As you can see, the Computer tells us that there are two hard drives, C and D. But this is deceptive. Actually there is one hard drive that has been partitioned at the factory into two partitions.
This one is pretty healthy. The C: drive has a Microsoft Windows icon on it. That means that it is the system partition. Most of the data is on the D: drive. The C: drive has plenty of free space. The problem that most people have is that their C; drives keep filling up. Why is that? Well there are a few reasons this happens. The main one is that most of the things you put on your computer end up on the C: drive. So when you import pictures from your camera, download movies from the Internet, or create spread sheets and word processing documents, they end up on the C: drive. If you use I-Tunes, and who doesn't, all of your music, movies and pod-casts end up on the C: drive. And if you play games, your save games end up on the C: drive and if you save often (which you should) these files take up a lot of space on your hard drive.

The reason this happens is because Windows provides several default folders that are used to keep your files organized. However, the organization of these folders hearkens back to the days of a single partition drives. The original location of these default folders is on the C: drive(or system partition). Savvy users can move their files to other locations to conserve space, but that can be a bit of a hassle.

So I'm going to show you how to move all of these files off of the C: drive and onto the D: drive and insure that all of your future saves and imports end up on the D: drive from now on. It's easy, really. This will free up the C drive to do what it does best, running Windows.

  Before we start, we need to make some preparations first. We need to create some empty folders on the D: drive that will be our new locations. (I'm assuming you know how to create new folders). So lets create the following folders on the D: drive: Documents, Music, Pictures, and Downloads. You can make more later once you get the hang of this. Before you proceed, right click each folder and go to properties. Make sure that under attributes, the read only option is unchecked. Then click apply and close the window. If it asks you to apply to all sub folders, say yes.

Now lets get to it. Open your User folder(usually your name... in my case it's called Rex). It is the top item in the right hand list of your start menu:

With a few simple clicks we are going to move all that data to the D; drive.

We will begin with the Downloads folder. Most web browsers use this folder as the default download location. So it can fill up pretty fast. Right click the download folder and go to properties. In the general tab, uncheck "read only" and click the "apply" button.

 

 Now go to the Location Tab and click move. (see above)

Now you will see a locate window (see below)

 

On the left column, you should click on the "Local disk D:" icon.

Now you will see a list of the folders on the D: drive on the right. Choose your new download folder and click the "select folder" button. At this point you should get a dialog asking you if you want to move all of the existing files to the new location. You should say yes.

After you click this button, it may take a while for the computer to move the files over to the D: drive depending on your system and the amount of files in the original folder.

When it is finished, you can repeat the same steps for the other folders in your User folder (My Documents, My Pictures, My Music) When you are finished. You can open the D: drive and see that all of the new folders that you created have magically gained the default icons that windows uses for these folders.

The cool thing about this is that every time you save to the Documents folder after this, the files will be saved on the D: drive. Also, every time you import new pictures from your camera to the pictures folder, they will be saved on the D: drive. Also the I tunes folder is located in the Music folder and it gets moved along with all the other data. So any new songs or movies that you purchase will be saved on the D: drive too.

This should save you a lot of space on the C: drive (or partition I should say).

While we are on the subject this strategy can also work if you actually have two or more  hard drives installed in you computer. Just move the default folders to the other drives (D: E: F:or whatever) just make sure you create empty folders on the target location first.