Making room on an old hard drive

[Dan Mitchell]

I'm planning to build a new PC in the near future, but in the mean time I'd like to squeeze a bit more life out of my current 90mhz Pentium by producing some hard drive space (a 1 gig drive). To that end, I've eliminated a number of programs I never use, defragged etc., but I'm looking through the system files I see a bizzillion .DLL files, old DOS .EXE's and a lot of even less recognizable stuff which, by their dates anyway, are pretty ancient. How can I tell what programs (if any) these libraries etc. go with? What other suggestions are their for weeding out the chaff? I'd really like to get all the useless junk which has build up over the years out of the way, but I'd hate to delete something essential.

Dan

[Paleo Pete]

The best way to do that is to format and reinstall. I always hesitate to recommend that, but sometimes it's the best way to go. You can look around, some utilities are available that will clean out the unused junk, but I don't know how reliable they are. You can also try the Disk Cleanup feature if you have it with your OS. Open My Computer, right click the drive and check in Properties. If Disk Cleanup is there it will remove some of the unnecessary garbage.

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Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines!
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[Randy_tx]

I would say the best way to squeeze more life out of it would be to go to a place where they deal in used stuff.......get you a 4-500 mb hard drive for about $20-$30 and put your swap file on it........In the absence of that, lower the amount of space the system uses for Temporary files, Temp. Internet files etc.

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"As hard as a rock & dumb as a brick"...Windows CEMeNT

[tjaymadison]

Take a peek at the Cursors and the Fonts sub-folders under the Windows folder. There's usually plenty of deadwood there that can be pruned. To be extra safe, move them to a new folder you create and leave them there for a few days while you make sure everything still works right. There are a couple of fonts that Win needs to be there, but the decorative or fancy ones are usually OK to remove. Because of cluster size, there can be a lot of "slack" waste due to all those 1K cursor files.

Also check Contol Panel > Add/Remove Programs > Windows Setup. There may have been some things installed when the system was new and 1G seemed like a lot of space, but now are just luxuries. Desktop Themes is a good candidate.

Have you considered compressing the drive using DriveSpace? I say this with some reluctance, because there is risk involved. (What's new? http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/rolleyes.gif ) And there is also a slight penalty in access speed to be paid. Most importantly, have a good working backup of everything important before going this way.

[This message has been edited by tjaymadison (edited 03-31-2001).]

[Randy_tx]

YIKES.......I knew disk compression would come up eventually http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/biggrin.gif Follow TJ's advice....BACK UP regularly if you choose this option, cause when a compressed drive gets messed up.....IT'S A MESS ! With a P-90 you will CRAWL with a compressed drive.....BUT it IS the cheapest way to keep a goin and you will get a ton of "new" room to work!

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"As hard as a rock & dumb as a brick"...Windows CEMeNT

[Paleo Pete]

Nope, don't compress it. It's a bad deal. Clean up the old one, get a second drive, format and reinstall...but try to avoid disk compression if possible.

Here's the deal...it creates a virtual drive and all your data is stored there. If one program flakes out, the only way to get the system back to normal is to format and reinstall, since it'a all seen as one "disk image" for lack of a better way to describe it. The system sees all the data as one single file, all packed in there together...any problems and you lose it all...no uninstalling and reinstalling that one program, once it corrupts the file, it corrupts everything...I'll have to dig through a book or two if you need more detailed specific info.

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Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines!
Note: Please post your questions on the forums, not in my email.

Computer Information Links (http://www.geocities.com/paleopete/)

[Dan Mitchell]

Thanks as always for the replies. I had thought of formatting & reinstalling, but in addition to the unidentifiable crud I have a lot of fairly large image files which are too big for floppies and which I have nowhere to put prior to formatting. I've compressed these as much as possible (which isn't much) as a group into a ZIP file, and even with this and all the other cleanup I've only got ~250M of free space (about 3 times what it had been). I just KNOW all those .DLL etc are the culprits!!! What I was trying to accomplish was enough space for IE so I could run Tax Cut to do my taxes http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/mad.gif I've been using older software for awhile & had no idea the extent to which new software was tied into IE. Sounds kinda like, I dunno uhhhhhh, maybe a MONOPOLY kinda thing...

Looks like my best bet is to complete that new machine ASAP. If I could just get my hands on that tax refund...

Dan

[Paleo Pete]

You might try online storage, I don't have any links handy, and Free Drive is the only one that comes to mind, but several places are available on the net that offer about 50MB of "virtual" drive space. You could upload some of the pictures, etc and download them again later. Yahoo briefcase would work for pictures too, if you have a Yahoo account, I don't know what the size limit is, but you can upload pictures. Zing (http://www.zing.com) is another online photo album, upload pictures, after a format and reinstall they're still there...For other files, documents etc, you could use a virtual hard drive...

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Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines!
Note: Please post your questions on the forums, not in my email.

Computer Information Links (http://www.geocities.com/paleopete/)