Boot Drive Almost Full

[donsor]

My boot drive (C:) where my OS reside is starting to get overpopulated. I still have a few Gigs to spare but soon it's going to fill up. What files, folders and/or programs can I safely transfer to another drive without uninstalling and re-installing?

[TwoRails]

A lot of the times you can add another drive and move the data over to it, keeping the programs and the like on the boot drive.

What are your system specs? make / model of computer, number of drives, power supply, etc?

[Lespaul20]

What's the size of that drive? You can put all of you personal documents and files on the other drive. You will have re-install programs to move them and I don't like have programs on a different drive than the OS.

[Negeva]

First thing I would do is clean the drive; by that I mean remove any junk files you might have, such as temporary internet files and other temp files - ccleaner is a good freeware tool for this. Next, I would back up any data to CD/DVD - you'd be amazed after browsing your drive how much data is there that you never or hardly ever look at - this is taking up space. After that, pay a visit to the Add/Remove Programs applet within the Control Panel and start pruning those old applications you never use. And finally, if you use System Restore reduce the amount of hard-drive space it consumes: Right click My Computer > Properties > System Restore tab. Select the individual drive and use the [Settings] button to allocate the space.

Hard-drives are dirt cheap these days, so it might be an ideal time to ask Santa for one. Personally, I loathe putting programs on any other drive other than the main Windows drive; some programs refuse to work like games and some media creation applications. But for purely data storage they're ideal.

Another thing to note is that you never should have less than about 10-15% of free space on a hard-drive. For one the pagefile/swapfile is dynamically assigned by Windows, so when you have too little free space and Windows needs to use the pagefile it can crash the machine. Also, that extra 'free' space can be used by applications and when you de-frag.

[Brothersoft]

Well, try this batch file.

removed by mod

Or if you use large physical memory, the paging file is also large in default setting. You can tweak it or redirect to other drive. Also you can turn off the system hibernation funtion, that will take up disk space as the size of physical memory.

[TwoRails]

Brothersoft: it's late, I'm tired, got flu, and rusty on my batch files, but why do you have lines in that batch file to wipe out all the program files and DLLs?? Wiping out is not what the OP was asking for:
... What files, folders and/or programs can I safely transfer to another drive without uninstalling and re-installing?

[Force Flow]

You are correct TwoRails. Running that script would effectively trash your system.

However, the concept of using batch files to clean out your temp files hadn't occured to me before.

[TwoRails]

I still use basic batch files for a lot of my backing up. One example is some databases where the data still fit on a CD-RW. Example:

echo This will copy files to the CD RW burner
echo Press any key to continue or Ctrl-C to EXIT
pause
xcopy f:\database\SourceDirectory\*.* R:\TargetDirectory\*.* /m /s /e /h

[Force Flow]

I use batch files with winRAR to backup some of my files. Quick & dirty solution :)

[Negeva]

Use to use bat files to clean the system as someone posted above - not the ones that would kill my system the other one just to delete temp and other junk on Win9x machines, but not used them in a very longtime on XP. Cleanup tools have made me lazy.

I use batch files with winRAR to backup some of my files. Quick & dirty solution :)

New to me. Care to explain/share.

[donsor]

I got have three drives. C (boot drive) is 76Gs, F: is 320Gs and G: is 300Gs. The last two have lots to spare but my boot drive which has the OS has my FSX (Flight Simulator Program) which uses up a lot of space.
My PC specs:
Asustek M2N32-SLI DeLuxe
2.4 G AMD 64 X2 Dual Core
1.5G PC6400 RAM
Two DVDRWs and one CDRW optical drives
EVGA 6950GT 256M video card
WinXP Home Edition SP

There lots of crap in my boot drive Program Files which could be transferred. Some are accessory programs such as Epson printer, etc. I just want to transfer a few large files.

[Force Flow]

New to me. Care to explain/share.

Sure. You can find the basics of the idea here: http://www.pcmech.com/view.php?issue=7#4

[TwoRails]

thanks for the link: it was nice reading NK's interview again :)