Paintbrush and defrag problems - can anyone help?

[swiperfox]

I am trying to resize photos that i have put onto the pc from the digital camera. I have always done it in paintbrush before but my mum gave me her computer and when i try to 'cut' the image it freezes and says 'out of memory' I have tried to do a defrag but it seems to just stick forever between 0 and 1%
Does anyone know how to fix it? TIA

a defrag does take a very long time. especially if it hasn't been done before... how long did you leave it?

about 3 hours - should i leave it running all day and see what happens? I dont think its been done before and there's an awful lot of crap on here as it was my 18 yo cousins who filled it with porn then my 14 yo sister's who filled it with eminem!!!!

If you haven't done any housekeeping on the machine before it might be an idea to stop the defrag and do a bit of manual tidying up first.

Use control panel, Add/remove programs. Delete any unused programs that you just dont need anymore.

Try emptying the recycle bin.

Manually delete any extra files (like the porn and the eminem!)

When you have removed as much as you can, try your program again. You might have cleared up enough space.

Run the defrag again when you have tidied everything you can. Not much point in defragging files that dont even need to be there. Will still take ages though.

I've done the manual bit as much as i can but theere are files hidden in there that i cant find or am not sure what they are under so dont want to delete something i shouldnt! I noticed when i ran a spyware and virus check that there were an awful lot of 'xxx' type files and i thought i'd deleted all that!!
Is this what will be messing up painbrush? and is a defrag the only way to fix it?