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My laptop has 106gb of memory. However, despite cleaning up my hard drive, and putting all my music/files onto an external hard drive, it's still saying I've only got 5gb left. I've tried defragmenting and stuff, anything else I can try? It's slow as fook at the mo (I have got rid of all my apps on start up),

reboot it

Booooo.

I thought that this would be a thread about black holes and stuff.

sorry BR!

restarted and hasn;t made any difference Chubbo.

What else have you got hiding away there Juddie?

Maybe worth shifting photos to the external hard drive and have a gandser through the installed programs list and see if there's anything that you're not using that can be wiped off.

Wouldn't be the data slowing your PC down. Have you done the usual malware/virus scans?

:doh:

Have much ram have you got?

Most common cause of a computer slowing down is a lack of ram, which in turn leads to high levels of paging of memory to the hard drive, which would be even slower if the drive is heavily fragmented (which it will be pretty much permanently when you've only got 5% free space).

Increasing the ram would likely speed things up but you'll still need a bigger drive or to clear some more stuff off it - you really want to keep the free space at 15% minimum.

If its been a while since you installed Windows on it, its likely there is a lot of space taken up by Windows Update files (most of which, especially the older ones, can be safely deleted). Worth checking to see what options you've got for System Restore as that can take up a fair bit of space as well.

Probably worth trying to look at what is taking your disk space. You could do a search for all files over say 10 MB (10240 KB).

Freeing space may not speed things up, but it can't hurt (as long as you are sure about what you are deleting).

So many things can cause slowness. Lack of disk space. Malware/virus/spyware. Down to annoying things like Hdd controllers being automatically set by Windows for PIO access rather than DMA.

I was running out of disk space on my old laptop at home. Gpt a new hard drive, lots of space and the thing flew. Previously upgraded to faster processor and more memory (RAM). Lack of disk space will slow down your computer by more than you think.

I need to update the FAQ about hard drives admittedly.

Do you have lots of programs installed? How big is the folder C:/Program Files?

Empty your recycle bin.

my program files folder is massive, yet I've uninstalled everything I don't use...

There may be some left over folders from uninstalls. You'll have to delete them manually. It's just that windows does a rubbish job at removing everything when you want to.

How big is massive?

temp files was 32 gb! just got rid...

Make sure you run a defrag again, as the drive will probably be fragmented to fuck at the moment.