Help! I'm clueless.

[StarsAboveYou]

Title says it all really!

Since PFB came along I have been religiously backing up my photos to my laptop. I realised recently that it was running low on space (less than 10% free and bar was red- dell Inspiron).

I deleted a lot of stuff off, haven't added any new photos since and it's back to critical again.

How can I work out what is using up my memory/what is safe to delete?

Thanks

I would say DVDs, not hard-drive. Hard-drives always fail, eventually.

Archive your "stuff" onto that.

"stuff" that you wouldn't want to lose (esp photos) make several copies of and store in different places, so that if (e.g.) your house burns down or your computer is stolen, you still have a copy in the shed.

If you send or receive emails with attachments, especially huge photos, delete them once you have safely filed or archived the attachments.

What version of Windows do you use? You'll need to look at what files and directories you have, and what's in them. Do you know how to?

What internet security package do you use?

How big is your hard drive?

Have you added programs or games to the machine since it was new? Do you have documents on it? What do you use it for?

Thanks for the replies.

Deleting emails, is that from my email account or by deleting temp Internet files?

I use windows vista. I know how to see what program's etc are there but don't know which ones I can safely delete and which are crucial for the computer to run.

I don't have any movies stored but I do know that ITunes takes up a lot of space (approx 28gb). I also have some software installed for teaching and as such there are some documents saved but not many.

It's mostly used for iTunes and creating lessons.

The hard drive is 139gb.

Security package is mcafee.

Assuming that you are looking at your programs via the add/remove programs screen, Windows won't show you programs that are not safe to delete.

That screen also tells you how big the programs are and the last time you used them. If your space problem is because of programs then the solution is simple.

The Recycle bin catches a lot of people out. They delete stuff and they think it has freed up space on the C drive. It hasn't. It sits in the Recycle bin until you empty it. The space is only freed up then.

If none of the above applies Google CC Cleaner. Its a free app that clears out your temp files. When you run it the app will tell you how much space you will recover if you continue. The files that will be deleted will be the Recycle bin and temp files from your surfing and other stuff. Windows itself does a poor job of tidying up after itself.

If still none of the above then do a search for all files bigger than 64mb for example.The results will highlight l the large files on your PC. Maybe you have large video files on a part of your PC that you don't expect.

Best thing to do is to back up all the stuff you want to keep on an external hard drive or DVDs and then reinstall Windows from scratch. It's worth doing this once in a while anyway but especially when things start to slow down.

Just think about it like a detox for your PC. Gets rid of all the crap which builds up over time and gets things chugging along nicely again.

Oh no... I wouldn't advise backing up onto DVD's as a long term archive solution, too risky. What if they degrade?

I would use two seperate hard drives, one to use, another to back up on to. You could go even further and have a second back up,perhaps to the cloud (if you agree to that, I'm not so sure).

Our final solution will be a NAS drive where all data will 'live'. And an external hard drive to back up onto.

I am experimenting using Dropbox as a storage space for documents and presentations between home and work. So far so good.

My big Eureka moment recently came when I realised that data needs to be disassociated from any one computing device. It cuts down on duplicated files and means I always have them to hand.

Have realised that I have contradicted myself there re: the cloud.

IMO, cloud is fine for non sensitive documents.. But I wouldn't use it for anything remotely sensitive or not for general consumption. I am deeply uneasy about letting personal data reside on someone else's server space.

Oh and I'd junk vista if I were you [grins]. Windows 8 is an improvement but requires an adjustment to what we normally expect windows to be.

Better still, junk windows and go Linux. Try the 'mint' distro.