Running out of room...a mess

[SHRED]

I have an XP Pro system.

It has four hard drives. The last GB numbers on the chart are free space.



My goal is to reformat the C drive and reinstall XP Pro (should I go with Win 7?) but I have no room to put things.
I'd like to save over to an external hard drive (any suggestions?) and have it when I upgrade in two years or so to something new.

Any good software that looks for duplicate files (I am sure I have them) and saves over documents, text, picture, etc...?


Here is my system's core:


Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 Kentsfield @ 2.4Ghz
GIGABYTE GA-P35-DS3L
4 GB G.SKILL PC2 6400
XFX HD-4870A-ZHDC XXX 1G
Antec True Power Trio TP3-550w PSU
XP Pro

[hobbit709]

1. First check the Temp and Temporary Internet Files folders.

I had one yesterday where I freed up 20Gb of disk space by emptying those folders.

Windows never deletes anything and its definition of Temporary is evidently Forever. I found files in there dating back to 2005. I've learned over the years to never keep data files on the C: drive. It makes it a lot easier if you have to reinstall. I don't use My Documents for anything. If your data is on a different partition and you have to wipe and reinstall on C: no other partition is affected by Format C:

Any good sized external drive works fine. What I do is make a folder on the external drive for each partition on the computer and label it Saved D:, E:, etc. and just copy and paste. Make a folder named Saved Docs and just copy and paste the whole My Documents folder into it. Once you save everything, you can search out duplicates and delete them.

If XP is working fine for you why bother with 7. Just because M$ won't support XP after next year doesn't mean it will stop working. IT may work better without the constant "fixes" that half the time screw up something.

[gvstn]

2. One quick thought

Which seems counter-intuitive since you are trying to save space but would give you a fresh install of XP to work with, is that you could use partitioning software to shrink your C: drive by 20gb. Create a new partition in that space and then do a fresh install of XP on your new partition. Once you transition to the new XP and have everything working correctly, you could begin going through the old XP at your leisure and look for duplicate or unnecessary files. Eventually deleting the old system files which you would no longer need and using that ~212gb partition for storing data only. (With only 20gb for your fresh XP install you would have to get used to saving data/downloads not in My Documents but on the 212gb partition. This is actually a good practice since it keeps your data independent of the OS.)

In the mean time, I have never found duplicate finder software very useful. It is so tedious as you have to go file by file which would take forever. I always give up after half an hour. I do find software like SpaceSniffer useful since it helps find large files that you may have forgotten about and can quickly free up lots of space if you find something you no longer need. (You don't want to delete anything in the WINDOWS folder. Only look for large personal files that you may have forgotten about and no longer need.)

http://www.uderzo.it/main_products/space_sniffer/

[SHRED]

3. thanks for the replies

I am seriously considering just getting an external HD, saving everything over, reformat/reinstall XP on the C drive, and then going through the external HD at my leisure.

Also, wouldn't an external HD allow me to access via my iPad? I noticed there are WiFi external drives now.

[hunter]

4. WinDirStat or a similar utility will help you find the cruft.

http://windirstat.info

That way you can go after the biggest space wasters first. On my machines it's usually home movie and video transfers that I've since upgraded. (When I started doing digital transfers my tools were primitive. I always keep the original media.)

Usually that's all I do. Looking for a lot of small files that are not taking up much room takes a long time.

Sometimes you can compress a rarely used directory full of small files, but that's another thing that takes time.

Being lazy is usually the winning strategy.

I don't have a Windows machine in front of me (I use Linux) and I can't recall what I use to find redundant files in Windows, but it usually turns out that most of my duplicate files are small things I use as "boiler plate" (little gifs and pngs, etc.) kept in the directories where I use them. If I only kept a single copy of these files I'd probably forget where they were and what they were called.

[wandy]

5. Just a suggestion........

Start with a 1 Tera Byte USB drive. This gives you more storage than you now have on all current drives.
Then use this nice piece of freeware (Redo) to make an image of the C drive........
http://redobackup.org/
Note this is a direct image so you can't repartition the drive and restore to a smaller partition.
You now have some chance of recovery if an attempt to repartition the C drive with third party software fails.
Of course Win XP goes non support in under a year so Win 7 in conjunction with that additional storage space would be a good move and may delay that upgrade for longer than 2 years.
You appear to have enough processing power to get by and if you can be sure the PC is fulley 64 bit capable Win 7 Pro 64 bit would be a good choice.
On any hardware platform I've come across Win 7 64 bit is quicker than XP 32 bit, not to mention it beats the heck out of any flavor of Vista.

Win 7 Pro has the ability to bring up a second level XP system. This may come in handy if you have an application that will not run under Win 7.
As you won't be adding hardware the 550W supply should be OK although I think having 4 HDs may be all you can ask it for.
If you go with an external USB drive you will want one that has it's own power supply.

[discntnt_irny_srcsm]

6. You seem comfortable...

...installing HDDs so I suggest you consider network attached storage. I have a couple boxes from Synology but QNAP, Netgear and others also make this type of equipment. (Sorry if you already know this stuff.) Mapping a network share is simple from windows explorer. It's under "Tools" on the menu bar.

XPpro enables you to use windows backup to point the backup at a network share.


The tools like windirstat that others have mentioned are great freeing space. Also consider making adjustments to the sizes of the reserves for the trash can and system restore. I think the default for the trash is ~10% of the HDD size, a waste IMHO. System restore is useful so I wouldn't shrink it too much. Disabling hibernation will get you back the 4 GB you have for RAM. (The hiberfile is the same size as your RAM and can be deleted if you disable hibernation.

Hope this helps.