HELP, please, Low disc space message on my elderly Toshiba Laptop!

[mediastar]

So far I have run CCleaner and AVG tune up, done a couple of defrags (one that took sixteen hours approx) and nothing has stopped the message. It keeps telling me to delete files, but how do I know if it is safe to do so and which files I could lose safely, is there an idiots' guide on line that will talk me through this, I am quite competent if guided gently through these things!

I know x had at least one external HDD, but I am a klutz and have no idea on where to attach these things to a laptop, is it time to call it quits and buy a new machine with a larger RAM and HDD or what? I have a friend with broadband and no machine so could I get this one cleaned up, move the stuff I want to keep onto the new machine and donate the old one to her, she only wants to surf a little bit and do some online banking, she would only need to get herself a new battery?

 

[sublime]

I had an elderly Toshiba laptop for ages, too, and I know what you mean!
Ye Anciente Toshe laptoppe was only used as a backup, but it was a good 'un and outlasted many other models.

Anyway, first of all, go through the 'documents' section and have a look at what's in there and what you'd like to keep. Music? Letters? Photos? Videos?

Either dig out your old portable hard drive [they just attach to a USB port] or spend a few quid on a little USB drive [memory stick, pen drive, they have different names but do the same thing] and transfer anything you want to keep on to there.

Delete anything you don't want straight away - that awful CD of 70s tunes you never want to hear again, you know the sort of thing - or items you have stored elsewhere.

Run C-Cleaner again, which will get rid of the files for good.

You may be able to free up enough disk space in an hour or so just by doing this.

However, I think there comes a point when your machine's better replaced, just because you keep hitting this buffer again and again and it becomes frustrating. You can get your old laptop upgraded, and extra memory added, but in my experience it's cheaper to actually replace the old with a brand new machine.

Some of the Amazon Outlet deals have been really good, with refurbished or cosmetically damaged laptops going for about half price. They're still under guarantee, etc etc, so they're worth looking out for. Many have ginormous memories, so the problem of having too little disk space never rears its head again.

Christmas is also a good time to buy as the manufacturers are competing for their slice of sales and there are some decent bargains out there.

 

[sheepdog]

I suspect that if you're running Win XP and have been doing all the updates then those will be consuming the disk space. A quick search for "deleting win xp service packs" should tell you what to remove safely. That and if you've been doing itunes, the sneaky software keeps all previous versions hiding in your documents folder! I removed a great deal of itunes updates from my sisters pc and recovered a lot of disk space.

But as above, if its over 6 years old seriously think about getting a newish one as the parts for older laptops are either non-existent or they are getting pricer. You could always convert the laptop to a linux machine using a compact flash card instead of a hard drive. Becomes a pretty good machine for someone at practically zero cost (like for visitors who you don't want listening to dodgy 70's music on your main pc ;-) )

 

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Sadly, it is VISTA! I did get the email about upgrading to Win8 at a discount, but gave up when mcafee (as provided by BT) said, no no, we can't cope with that yet! I deleted a few files this morning. For example, I had someone raving about how great UBUNTU is so I thought, "I'll try that", but I couldn't get it running, then I thought I had removed it from my system, but when I used the AVG infrequently used files app, up it popped, so much for easy to install, easy to get rid of... GRR!

 

[mediastar]

An Update:
Thought I had got rid of Ubuntu when I found I couldn't work out how to use it, so I selected uninstall back then, however, got AVG to look at all unused programs and there it was eating up space, got rid and now it no longer cries for more disk space, YAY! Maybe I'll get another year out of it!