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Some computer questions!!
LittleKey
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
As you can see, I have some problems. My (admittedly small) hard drive is totally full, and i want to return my computer to the way it was when i first got it. i.e., just windows. (It's custom, if that matters). The main reason behind this is that I have no idea where all the space went. And it seems to be making my computer perform slower in games (mostly BF2, BF2142, Crysis.) When I go into add or remove programs, and count it up, I find about 21 GB of space taken up by my stuff. fine. then, i add a few GBs to that estimate because of hidden things, necessary computer stuff, etc. So let's say it's about 25 GBs now. My 70 GB (rounded up for convenience) minus 25 or so GBs should equal about 45 GBs. So where did 45 whole gigs of space go!??!? There seems to be a ton of random junk clogging up my computer and negatively affecting my games' performance, that I can't fix. I figure the easiest way to fix it will be just to nuke my computer back to windows and start over. Not a big deal, i need to replace a few games maybe, but whatever. Which brings me to my next question: I don't know how to nuke my computer! I THINK i have a system restore disk and a windows disk if necessary. Is it even called system restore when you put your computer back to just windows? As if I needed another problem, I don't even know how to back up data. I think I need to back up my itunes library and my games, and that's it I think. So my questions to you to you are 1. Should I really strip my computer back down to where it only has windows? 2. How would I do that? 3. How do I back up data? Thanks a lot in advance, your reply could affect the future of my computer
LittleKey on
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http://cdburnerxp.se/
A video on locating files for backup and backing them up via the default burning software that's part of explorer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mERIC7G4Pk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isD6Aw3uEdM
I don't think you have bookmarks covered in those. I'd suggest doing a search on youtube for tutorials for that.
Other then that, a system restore disk will take care of the rest. Just follow the prompts.
2: Put in a windows cd or a system recovery disk and restart your computer, follow directions. Its very important to make sure you have all your drivers on hand before you do this. A system recovery cd should have them on it, if you have a windows cd you may have to hunt them down on the interwebs.
3: While there are more sophisticated ways of backing up data I still prefer going through my hard drive and moving everything I want to keep to an external drive/cd/dvd/other hard drive/other computer.
If you have never reformatted before its a good idea to read any guides you can find on the internet. Its very important to back up everything you want to keep as reformatting will give you a completely clean slate. This includes things you may not consider right off the bat ex. bookmarks in your browser.
In the mean time get ccleaner. It's a free program that will go though and find all those temp and unused files and get rid of them for you. You can get it here http://www.ccleaner.com/ That should free up at least a a gig on an older system.
http://www.sixty-five.cc/sm/v1x.php
It gives you a visual representation of your drive and therefore lets you see where all the space is going - if you've got huge files you didnt know about they'll stand our like a sore thumb. You can even delete files from within the program, no hunting within windows involved.
water spirals the wrong way out the sink
The stripped down way to see where your stuff is simple:
Go to Windows Explorer (Start->Run->explorer->OK)
Show hidden files and system files (Tools->Folder Options->View->Show hidden files and folders + unHide protected operating system files)
Go to your hard drive, and start right clicking on folders and viewing their properties.
Their full size, including subdirectories, should be shown as it's counted up. Some stuff you can't change; Windows should be about 3-4 GBs. But you can poke around and you should have a sense of which directories seem improperly large.
As for slowing your computer down, well that'd depend on what you're running and how much RAM you have. Many programs will write to the drive, but those will usually fail if you don't have any space left. It does mean that you have no space left for additional virtual memory. However, if you haven't received any warnings about that, it means you haven't exceeded your current capacity for virtual memory anyways, and again, if that happened, you'd receive a warning and programs would start shutting down.
No significant slowdown should be occurring on your computer due to your hard drive being near full. It might be a virus/malware, or even applications you installed yourself. I see you have quite a number of icons in the bottom right of your screen. Don't know what the hell they are, but keeping the number of them down is generally a good idea. Also, use your Task Manager to see what might be running and chewing up CPU/memory without your express consent.
If you have no disk space, your system performance will suffer. Windows won't be able to keep as a big a pagefile file, notably. I don't remember when/if they added Prefetch (or superfetch or whatever they call it) but that takes a hit from disk space as well. Almost no free space means very fragmented free space which means longer write times (bad for databases).
Sure, you aren't going to go from blazing fast to super slow (especially in a game, or a office type workload) but disk space does affect performance.
and you might want to uncheck compress disk to save space as windows docent know what part is its own operating system and compresses files it needs and has uncompress them later. and i haven't ever noticed it actually free up any space
Windows preallocates the pagefile though. As in, when he sees that his hard drive is 69GB, the pagefile is already included. I think prefetching works in the same way, unless he's running new programs that have yet to have their prefetch trace written, but he still has some disk space for that. Not very familiar with prefetching personally. The point about fragmentation is well taken though.
water spirals the wrong way out the sink