Would a Larger Hard Drive be Sufficient?

My Dell Studio XPS is 5 years old and my warranty expires next week.  It is slowing down because my C drive of 500GB is almost full.  I have an internal D drive, 1 TB, that I could partition and do a copy of my OS.  I have Windows 7.  I would buy another 1 TB internal hard drive and recopy the OS onto it.  I have only 12 GB of RAM.

I have several 4 TB external drives that are used for storage.  Neither of the internal drives are used for photo storage.

Living in the bush away from easy access to computer stores and unable to easily get my desktop unit out of the house and transported to anywhere for repairs, having 24/7 Dell help has been a godsend, along with EJ and other tech people on Naturescapes.  I would prefer to stick with Dell.

Does this make sense?  I would like to wait another year to upgrade if possible. 

If youa re only using your C drive for the OS and programs and it is almost full then you have probably accumulated 250GB of junk that you don't need and possibly many GB of temporary file and install files that aren't needed anymore and downloads of software updates that are long out of date - all of this is typically stuck into your downloads folder.  I'd go through that and you will likely find tons of stuff that can be deleted.  Then get rid of all but the last couple of restore points.  if you've never done that you can probably get 50 to 100GB back just from that.

Then defrag the drive, and clean up the drive with something like ccleaner including getting rid of bad registry entries and your drive will perform like new again

E.J. Peiker wrote:If youa re only using your C drive for the OS and programs and it is almost full then you have probably accumulated 250GB of junk that you don't need and possibly many GB of temporary file and install files that aren't needed anymore and downloads of software updates that are long out of date - all of this is typically stuck into your downloads folder.  I'd go through that and you will likely find tons of stuff that can be deleted.  Then get rid of all but the last couple of restore points.  if you've never done that you can probably get 50 to 100GB back just from that.

Then defrag the drive, and clean up the drive with something like ccleaner including getting rid of bad registry entries and your drive will perform like new again

Or she may be storing LR previews on C as this is the default for LR.
It is easy to have 250 GB's worth of previews if you create 1:1.

signgrap wrote:

E.J. Peiker wrote:If youa re only using your C drive for the OS and programs and it is almost full then you have probably accumulated 250GB of junk that you don't need and possibly many GB of temporary file and install files that aren't needed anymore and downloads of software updates that are long out of date - all of this is typically stuck into your downloads folder.  I'd go through that and you will likely find tons of stuff that can be deleted.  Then get rid of all but the last couple of restore points.  if you've never done that you can probably get 50 to 100GB back just from that.

Then defrag the drive, and clean up the drive with something like ccleaner including getting rid of bad registry entries and your drive will perform like new again

Or she may be storing LR previews on C as this is the default for LR.
It is easy to have 250 GB's worth of previews if you create 1:1.

Possible.  She didn't indicate whether or not she was a LR user.  I always err on the side of assuming not because I can't imagine actually wanting to have LR on my own computers  

I don't use Lightroom. I'll check for old updates etc. Thanks!

OK, so do I go to Programs>Uninstall and uninstall all the updates older than 2015?

Noooooo!!!!!  You will kill your computer.  You can uninstall programs you don't use that are in there but do not undo previous updates.

Since you asked that question, please have a computer professional or somebody that has good computer knowledge do what I wrote above!

How about making the C drive visible and right clicking on it to pull up properties.  A window will pop up and select the disk cleanup button. The OS will evaluate your files and suggest the ones to delete.  You then click OK; then a window will pop up and ask if you want to delete the files; then you hit the delete button.
This is simple and shouldn't get you into too much trouble.

Charlie Woodrich wrote:How about making the C drive visible and right clicking on it to pull up properties.  A window will pop up and select the disk cleanup button. The OS will evaluate your files and suggest the ones to delete.  You then click OK; then a window will pop up and ask if you want to delete the files; then you hit the delete button.
This is simple and shouldn't get you into too much trouble.

That will definitely help but nothing like what I'm suggesting   I'm guessing with a real clean-up by somebody that knows what they are doing, she could get half that C drive back

E.J. Peiker wrote:

Charlie Woodrich wrote:How about making the C drive visible and right clicking on it to pull up properties.  A window will pop up and select the disk cleanup button. The OS will evaluate your files and suggest the ones to delete.  You then click OK; then a window will pop up and ask if you want to delete the files; then you hit the delete button.
This is simple and shouldn't get you into too much trouble.

That will definitely help but nothing like what I'm suggesting   I'm guessing with a real clean-up by somebody that knows what they are doing, she could get half that C drive back

You are right.  This would just buy her some time.

I was able to get my son to help me. He is usually way too busy with business clients but did a short-term solution and got me to the point where I have 100 GB free on the boot drive. He is going to work on getting me to the point where I could have another year out of this computer when he comes to visit is a few weeks.

There is a saying I saw on Facebook a few days ago that may have helped get his attention. I reminded him that I taught him how to use a spoon!

Thank-you for all your help, everyone! Much appreciated as always.

This is exactly why Naturescapes is so valuable to me!

Eleanor

That should be good for now but definitely do a defrag and then have him do the rest of the stuff when he comes to visit.

I might also suggest doing a "disk cleanup" from the drive explorer. Do this...

1.  Open the file explorer, right click on the "C" drive and select "properties".

2.  Then click on "Disk Cleanup", then "OK", then "Delete Files"

3.  Click on "Disk Cleanup" again but this time click on "Clean up system files", then click on "More Options" tab, then click on "Clean up" in the "System Restore and Shadow Copies" section, then click on "Delete", then "OK, then "Delete Files"

4.  Click on "Tools" tab, then "Defragment Now", select the "C" drive then click "Defragment Disk"

5.  Reboot


Brian