I am running out of disc space on my laptop. What is the best way to free up space?

Question

I have lots of photographs on the laptop

Answer 1

Burn all your photo's to disc rather than storing them on your laptop,this will free up a lot of space

Answer 2

The best solution would be to get an external hard drive. I've recently got one, after having this exact problem with my own laptop. Windows works better too, now that have more than 1GB of free space for Windows to use. I got a Network drive attached to my wireless router, but these are a little more expensive then the plain USB drives (very handy though)

Also you should have backups of your photos, as you won't want to loose them if your laptop/or hard drive dies.

You can get a decent size external HDD for around £50, but always consider getting one bigger then you think you'll need.

Answer 3

Back up some of your photo's to disc and delete them from the computer. Photos generally take up a lot of space. Uninstall any old programmes that you no longer use. Use the disc cleanup facility in accessories to get rid of temporary files. Delete all the useless old emails. Defragment the disc, again this is in accessories. Delete your web browser history. Run a spyware scan, if you haven't done this before there'll be loads of it to get rid of!

Answer 4

WindirStat is an excellent program that will give a visual display of what's taking up space on your drive. you might find some really big files hiding away that you forgot you had and can delete

http://windirstat.info/

Of course only delete files you know you can remove safely. If in doubt click it to show only files in the My Documents section

Answer 5

you could transfer the photos onto an external hard drive or usb pen(flash drive) or burn them to dvd.Just think how upset you will be on the day you laptop stops working if you haven't done this.

Also if you are using Windows XP and the disk is using NTFS then you can compress the whole hard disk to make more space.

If using XP but still in FAT32 then search google for "convert fat32 to ntfs" it is easy to do and your laptop will be better for it.

Most important thing though is to move or at least copy the photos from your Hard Drive, you only need one bad crash and you have lost them for ever. Hard drives don't last for ever and laptops are easy to bang or drop!

Answer 6

create a file for your pics and then do a system sync. It frees up space on your hard drive. disc defrag

Answer 7

By an external hard drive. You can probably get a couple hundred gig for about £60 to £70

Answer 8

if your potographs are in .bmp or another high definition format that’s your problem. You may try to reformat them to .jpg where the change is not noticeable. If they are in an econo-format then you may try disk clean up that will compress and eliminate old and unused files. If this doesn’t work it’s time to think on buying an external hard drive if you want to keep them at hand.

Answer 9

First, run your disc cleanup and disc defragmenter. Then consider putting your pictures in a zipped files. Also, you could put some(or all) of them on a CD or memory stick.

Answer 10

Get a portable hard drive...that plugs into one of your laptop's USB ports and move all your pictures onto that.

The come in all sizes...from 10G to over 200G...

I used to have one that had all my Graphic Design work on it, plus all my animations I made. They're really nice and handy...but can be kinda expensive, especially the bigger you go.