Topic: Not enough space

[fish4772]

When setting up my hard drive i partitioned 12 gb for ,my operating system runing windows xp sp1.....
its a 80gb hard drive but noticed recently that i was being warned i was running out of space when downloading some video....looked at the information  under hard disk drives and it says hard drive capacity 12 gb....should i have done anything different...your help will be very well appreciated..thanx

[Sandra]

I usually set the boot partition for XP at 40 gig on anything from 80 gig upwards.
20 gig I would say would be the absolute minumum.

12 gig was ok for 98 and earlier but once you have a few programs installed on XP you will soon be approaching, if not already in, double figures.
If you havent moved your Swap file (Page File) to another drive then you will seriously harm the potential performance of your pc.

60 gig is the recommended size for Vista by the way.

[Simon]

60 gig is the recommended size for Vista by the way.

Bloody hell!  Just to install it?    I know most new PCs have huge hard drives, but they are not selling this well to existing Windows users, with perhaps a 2-3 year old PC are they. 

[Sandra]

I didnt read about the 60 gig recommendation until after I installed Vista and used a 40 gig partition as I would have done for XP.

I have just looked at my C drive and even though I havent got as many programs installed as I had on my previous XP installation I have used 17.5 gig.

I save anything that saves to C by default to another drive so I should be ok but anyone with multiple users who just let windows save where it wants to, usually C in that users documents and settings, then they could have problems after a few months running Vista on that size of partition.

[Simon]

I find that incredible!  Another reason not to upgrade to Vista.

[fish4772]

Umm ok  thanx,that sounds like a muck up on my part then is there anyway i can alter the partition at this later stage?

[Sandra]

Theres a few programs that will resize your partitions without losing data but you may have to free up some space on C first as they dont seem to work that well if a partition is over 90% full.

The only one I have used is called Partition Magic but there are others.

Another thing you could do is to make an image of your C drive and back up your data off the remaining partition on that drive.
Use DOS to format and repartition it to the size you want and then use the image of C to restore your pc to how it is now complete with your installed programs and any updates you may have done.

[fish4772]

Thankyou Sandra...do you know if the resize program is a free download or have yet got to buy another program to use once..!!!!!

[Sandra]

There will be free versions I should think but I havent heard of one.

There will be try before you buy but they may have limitations on how you can use them.

If I can find a free one I will let you know 

[fish4772]

Hi Thanx everyone for helping me out,ive bought a copy of the said program and what else can I say except Job Done.....easy!

[Sandra]

Pleases to hear that it worked ok