Archived from groups: microsoft.public.windowsxp.hardware (
More info?)
On Fri, 17 Jun 2005 03:21:02 -0700, "tami"
>I am running Windows XP with a 40GB HD which has only 32MB free space.
32M's a bit low, but you can likely free up a good 200M quite
painlessly; more so if you have multiple user accounts, and all of
these accounts have done a lot of web browsing in IE.
>installed another 80GB HD as a second (slave).
You will most likely find the 80G will be faster than the 40G. If you
need to "just" format and rebuild the software installation from
scratch, then I'd suggest using the 80G HD for the OS - or (if you can
control where things go) a smaller partition on that 80G.
The slow part of HD access is moving the heads, and it takes about the
same sort of time to traverse the full "length" of the HD. NTFS parks
some things in the beginning of the volume and other things in the
middle of the volume, so even when the HD is empty, you may be cursed
with head travel at least half the "length" of the HD that defragging
simply won't fix. When the HD fills up, it gets worse.
Now if you put, say, an 8G C: for thge OS on the 40G, no matter how
fragmented that volume gets, head travel is never more than 20% of the
"length" of the HD. Do the same on the 80G, and it's only 10%, with
more data per cylinder and less head skippery. That's why small
partitions on large HDs rock, when it comes to speed - as long as you
aren't stretching the heads over other volumes, or course.
Yep, 8G's enough for XP and core apps, IF you're very proactive about
kicking things to go where you want them to go - left to its own
devices, the OS hasn't much of a clue. That's likely more hard work
than you'd like to do, so I'm not saying it's right for you ;-)
OK; how to free up space.
Step #1: Empty and resize IE web cache
Go into each user account and run Internet Explorer. To Tools,
Internet Options, and on the "front page" of the tabbed dialog, you'll
see Temporaryt Internet Files, Settings. The duhfault will be
something insane, like 128M, 256M or ever over 1G of HD space
alloxcated to yesterday's web scraps, which amount to a couple of Megs
a day, if that. Crunch that down to 20M or so, then purge the cache.
Repeat this process in every user account you can log into. Yup, the
bloat is repeated on a per-account basis.
You can do the same in Netscape or Firefox, but the gains will be
less, as these typically allocate only 50M or sto themselves.
Step #2: Resize your System Restore (SR) allocation
If you're down to 32M free, then chances are SR has suspended itself
already, so hasn't been tracking changes awhile - in which case, the
chances are the SR data's invalid anyway.
To access SR, rt-click on "My Computer" and choose Properties, System
Restore. Each fixed HD volume will have status (Monitoring,
Suspended, or Turned Off) and a slider that says how much space it can
use. You want SR for very short-term recovery, i.e. to undo something
that went wrong within the hour, or at least no more than a day or so
ago - so there's no need to allocate enough space to keep two weeks of
material (though one big install or Service Pack can be over 200M).
By default, SR will allocate a LOT of space to itself. I run 400M on
SR space on my 8G C:, and turn it off on all other volumes as I don't
install any crucial apps on any other volumes. Once again, YMMV, but
if you could shrink it from 4G to 1G, it would be Nice, I'm sure
Step #3: Clear out your Temp files
Easiest way is via the Disk Cleanup tool in Start, Programs,
Accessories, System Tools. Else you'd have to dig into each user
account's Local Settings\Temp and be careful about what you chop
there. I might run Disk Cleanup from each user account, anyway.
Step #4: Don't use Fast User Switching or Hibernate
Fast User Switching will dump currently inactive user account memory
contents to the pagefile (typically on C:; keep it there if you can,
for speed) when switching accounts - and that will bloat the pagefile
and hog space. Hibernating to HD will also dump RAM to HD, and
paradoxically, the more RAM you have, the more that hurts.
Step #5: Dump your material to CDR
No, not talking about copying stuff off HD to CDR to make space; don't
do that just yet. More likely, I'm thinking of material you thought
you'd already written to CDR that's still on HD in the CD Burning
workspace within your user account's subtree.
Once again, each user account has its own CD Burning bay, and thus its
own opportunity to waste a lot of HD space. Repeat the process in
each user account - write the stuff to CDR and/or clear it!
Step #6: Dump the Trash
Both the Recycle Bin, and the Deleted Items from Outlook, OE, or
whatever email app you use.
Step #7: Compact your mailboxes
You can only do this safely if you have a bit of free HD space to
start with. When you "delete" messages from mailboxes, typically the
space they took is not reclaimed, unless you compact the mailbox to
rebuild the indexes etc. Same goes for any other databases.
Start with the smallest database or mailbox files first, leave the
biggest for last, in case the task runs out of workspace.
Step %8: Check your file system
Two aspects to this. First, check the file system for errors using
ChkDsk /F, accepting that this will likely damage or destroy any
already-damaged files, and make them indistinguishable from files that
aren't damaged (until you use them, that is).
Second, look around to see what's taking up space; rt-click on
folders, choose Properties, see the size of the contents. Windows
Explorer will, by default, hide a lot of stuff; set it not to do so,
if you want to see what's up - but then, it's up to you not to delete
unfamiliar things you see for the first time. It's your bulldozer;
drive carefully - Windows welcomes careful drivers.
Third, if you can't figure where all the space is gone, suspect
malware that may be using ADS (Alternate Data Streams). This is a
great hiding place for stuff, as the wretches UI tells you NOTHING
about what's going on there - so download and use a free tool such as
AdAware, MSASBeta that can "see" ADS, or ADS Spy (that's my tool of
choice; also free). Once again, drive carefully.
If you are using FATxx instead of NTFS, there's no ADS to fret about.
Step %9: Careful with disk compression
NTFS supports disk compression on a file-by-file basis, and that can
be tempting at times like these. Be careful not to compress files
that are often in use; it may slow you down quite a bit.
Step %10: Celebratory Defrag
Once you've freed up a lot of space, that's a great time to do a
defrag to snap existing files together, and move all the free space
into nice contiguous lumps (NTFS) or lump (FATxx).
By now, you may find you don't need to panic, swp HDs etc. anymore,
but you may still want to move bloaty stuff from C: to some other
volume. Don't try and move programs, for reasons mentioned
(shortcuts, registry pointers and other dependencies). Instead, find
your My Music, My Pictures and My Videos bloat-buckets, and drag them
with the Right mouse button to the new HD volume, choosing Move when
you release the Right button there.
That's often enough to reset the shell folder pointers in the registry
correctly, but you may want to download and use TweakUI for XP to
check that out. Also, existing apps may have read the pointer to
these locations when they installed, and may now be using the old
value, so be prepared to do the Tools, Options thing in Windows Media
Pimper, Real Player and so on.
Once again, each user account has its own My Videos, My Pictures, My
Music etc. so repeat in all user accounts. You may want to rename the
folders after Rt-dragging them in place so they don't collide; e.g.
"Fred Music", "Mary Music" etc. which also helps keep the names in the
newfangled XP Start Menu straight.
>How do I move some programming (applications) to the new HD
>without having to uninstall and reinstall?
Experimentally, and Carefully. Some games will work, many will not.
MS Office will blow up in your face; don't even think about it.
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Forget
http://cquirke.blogspot.com and check out a
better one at
http://topicdrift.blogspot.com instead!
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