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General => Technical Help => Topic started by: Davedrave on Friday 05 April 24 21:13 BST (UK)
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I would very much appreciate help with a problem I’m having with my laptop. I have a Dell and am using Windows 10. I am unable to run some of my photo editing software properly and it seems to be because there ism’t enough free space on my C drive. The laptop has a 250 Gb SSD and a 1 Tb hard drive. I’ve deleted all of the items I can think of which I don’t seem to need, and emptied the recycle bin. What might I try now? The D drive is only about two thirds full at present. (Please keep things very basic for me: I’m not the brightest spark where these things are concerned ;D )
Dave :)
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I'm only on an android tablet at the moment so I can't give you specific details but I once experienced unexpectedly having a very full drive and it was because I was creating a sequential backup and every day a lot of the whole disc was being backed up to another part of it so I suggest until you get any better suggestions try examining your backup settings.
Zaph
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Do you perform (simple) Disk Cleanup on a regular basis? It removes unwanted files and safely frees up space. https://www.howtogeek.com/825855/disk-cleanup-windows-10/
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Photo editing software uses a lot of memory so it stows things temporarily on your hard drive while it is working. Unfortunately software tends to use the 'C' drive for this regardless of whether there is much more space on your 'D' drive. Assuming your big hard drive has more space than your SSD drive it might be worth looking for the setting to tell it to use the other one. Unfortunately I can't remember the right jargon. Anyone else?
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How much RAM does your laptop have? Ideally your programs would do all the work using just the RAM and not need to use the slower hard drives.
I recall that when you plug in a USB memory stick that you may be able to use that memory as extra RAM or maybe it was extra hard drive. Not seen the option recently but then I have been using a MAC for some years and that has 16 Gb of RAM. And I rarely do photo or video editing.
As for using your One Tb hard drive. That drive is probably a mechanical drive rather than SSD so not great to use for running programs as it would be slower I think. However just the job for any backups you are making or data you do not routinely access.
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Many thanks all for your help and suggestions. I tried another disk cleanup and I also tried to see what is actually occupying the space on ‘C’. What I did discover was that whilst I have got all of my photos stored on ‘D’ drive, on ‘C’ drive, lurking under ‘users’, was my documents folder, with nearly 2 Gb of data in it. I copied the folder, pasted it to ‘D’ and then deleted it from ‘C’, and did another cleanup to empty the recycle bin. My photo programs seem to be working OK now. (I have all of my documents and photos backed up to external HDD and some of it in the cloud too, so I felt fairly happy that I wouldn’t cause too much of a disaster if my copying from ‘C’ to ‘D’ had gone awry.)
Dave :)
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There is a fairly comprehensive article on cleaning up your drive in an issue of Computer Active due out on the 10th April. I subscribe and have already had my copy. I freed up over 60gb on my drive. Not saying you would but lots of pointers on what you can do and also what you must not do.
Ray
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Back in the dim, dark, distant past before Windows :o, we had a user at work who tried to be clever.
He freed up disc space by deleting some files - Command.com and io.sys - essential system files!
Then he wondered why his PC failed to work! ;D
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There is a fairly comprehensive article on cleaning up your drive in an issue of Computer Active due out on the 10th April. I subscribe and have already had my copy. I freed up over 60gb on my drive. Not saying you would but lots of pointers on what you can do and also what you must not do.
Ray
Thanks, I’ll look out for that, sounds useful.
Dave :)
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250 Gb is very small by todays performance laptop standards and whilst you have not answered a question on the amount of RAM installed the size of the SSD indicates that is will have the minimal amount.
Think 2Gb RAM for each CPU core as being the minimum required, double that for Photo Editing.
As suggested a Macbook is by far the best Laptop for Photo and Video editing. We have a Macbook Air and it is blistering fast when I am using Photoshop, or video editing using FCP Pro or Da Vinci Resolve. Ours is by no means top of range and it is far cheaper than an Asus Windows 11 Laptop with the same performance.
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I did a search online about using a usb flash drive as RAM and it seems I was right. Windows 8 and 10 can do this. Best you look up the instructions yourself.
As the memory stick will be left in your laptop permanently you should buy a physically small device so it does not stick out too much.
As your hard drive is SSD rather than a mechanical drive it may not give a big speed increase but it could up your effective RAM to say 32 Gb.
You could try it out with whatever USB drive you currently have though older USB drives will be slower.
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250 Gb is very small by todays performance laptop standards and whilst you have not answered a question on the amount of RAM installed the size of the SSD indicates that is will have the minimal amount.
Think 2Gb RAM for each CPU core as being the minimum required, double that for Photo Editing.
As suggested a Macbook is by far the best Laptop for Photo and Video editing. We have a Macbook Air and it is blistering fast when I am using Photoshop, or video editing using FCP Pro or Da Vinci Resolve. Ours is by no means top of range and it is far cheaper than an Asus Windows 11 Laptop with the same performance.
Thank you. I’ve managed to find my laptop’s RAM at last, and it is 8GB. OS (C) has 8.8 GB free of 103 GB (showing a red bar. Does this mean that I was mistaken, and that my SSD is even smaller than 250 GB?). DATA (D) has 356 GB free of 931 GB (showing a blue bar). I don’t do video, and for photos I use DxO PhotoLab for raw conversion, and it has worked fine until recently and even now it seems to work most of the time without a problem. I use Affinity Photo and/or an oldish version of Photoshop Elements for other tasks.
The minimum system requirements for my version of PhotoLab are 8GB RAM and 4 GB of available disk space. This is the same minimum as for my NIK Collection, though this does recommend 16 GH RAM and 6 GB disk space. IIRC, I may have run into a problem when using the HDR program in NIK, but I can’t be certain of that. I don’t mind the software being a bit slow, since I’m not using it other than as a hobbyist. I’ll look into the USB flash ploy as a possible short-term answer.
Dave :)
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Use Windows Explorer to view the Laptop.
Open the My Computer and highlight the C drive, right click on it and select Properties.
You then see the details of the C drive.
What I would expect is that there is a hidden partition inside which is the Operating System restore files.
As for RAM if you ring Dell with your model and serial number they can quote you the RAM upgrade cost and talk you through how to do it if you are unsure.
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Dave you said earlier that you had emptied the trash bin. Was that an immediate deletion? Sometimes the S/W will not really delete it until after 30 days.
I've just been deleting the BBC iPlayer App from my computer and when I looked at the associated folders in the trash bin saw that the downloads folder contained 68Gb of old downloads. What's really annoying is that the vast majority of this was stuff which I could not access. I had assumed (foolishly) that anyone designing a bit of program to every day download the local news but not let you see the items from previous days would not have just left the old data sitting on my computer just gradually eating up more and more space.
Having deleted the offending stuff from my trash bin (permanently) I now have 180GB rather than 112GB available on my hard drive.
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Use Windows Explorer to view the Laptop.
Open the My Computer and highlight the C drive, right click on it and select Properties.
You then see the details of the C drive.
What I would expect is that there is a hidden partition inside which is the Operating System restore files.
As for RAM if you ring Dell with your model and serial number they can quote you the RAM upgrade cost and talk you through how to do it if you are unsure.
Thanks for this information. I have looked into it and now realise that "C" drive is actually only 128 GB, but I also found that I had some files hiding on "C" that should have been on "D", and so have moved them and freed up more space.
I suspect that when I've run into problems with the photo software it has possibly been when I've had several photo programs open at once.
I'll look into the possibility of upgrading the RAM as you suggest.
Dave :)
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Dave you said earlier that you had emptied the trash bin. Was that an immediate deletion? Sometimes the S/W will not really delete it until after 30 days.
I've just been deleting the BBC iPlayer App from my computer and when I looked at the associated folders in the trash bin saw that the downloads folder contained 68Gb of old downloads. What's really annoying is that the vast majority of this was stuff which I could not access. I had assumed (foolishly) that anyone designing a bit of program to every day download the local news but not let you see the items from previous days would not have just left the old data sitting on my computer just gradually eating up more and more space.
Having deleted the offending stuff from my trash bin (permanently) I now have 180GB rather than 112GB available on my hard drive.
Thanks, that's interesting. I did actually delete the contents of the recycle bin. I don't really use my laptop for much other than photographic work and word processing, and always use my iPad for watching iPlayer and most internet searching etc.
Dave :)
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You could also look into upgrading your 1 Tb hard drive to an SSD that would also improve speeds.
£68 for a 2.5 SSD from Scan Computers which should be a direct replacement for the hard drive, but it may need a fixing bracket as well
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You could also look into upgrading your 1 Tb hard drive to an SSD that would also improve speeds.
£68 for a 2.5 SSD from Scan Computers which should be a direct replacement for the hard drive, but it may need a fixing bracket as well
Thank you. The price seems very reasonable, but I'm just wondering how safe it would be for me to attempt a DIY replacement, or whether I might be better to go to a home computer technician. How idiot-proof would replacement be, I wonder?
Dave :)
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If you do not know what you are doing a Tech is the best place to go.
At least you now know the retail price of the hardware.
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If you do not know what you are doing a Tech is the best place to go.
At least you now know the retail price of the hardware.
Thanks, good advice.
Dave :)
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Windows does provide a useful tool called "Disk Clean-up", under "Windows Administrative Tools".
Once it has loaded, click on "Clean up system files".
It will then spend a while trying to estimate how much can be reclaimed under various categories.
The most productive will be "Windows Update Cleanup" and "Delivery Optimization Files".
The first of these merges all those monthly updates into a singe item rather than keeping them separately. The second keeps copies of updates to Windows Store Apps so they can be provided more quickly to other machines on your own network (which you probably don't have).
You can actually tick ALL the boxes; Windows will rebuild anything from this list that it needs in future.
While I was checking the text that appears, I just reclaimed over 10GB of disk space.
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I have recently been trying to back up some data onto USB flash drives and am surprised to find just how slow the process is. About an hour to write a GB.
So I withdraw all I said about using using USB flash drives as extra RAM or hard disk space. Useless.
I gather that you can buy devices like USB drives but which internally are actually like SSD drives. They might be of some use.
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USB 2.0 can transfer at 480 megabits per second - that's a gigabyte in less than 17 seconds.
HOWEVER few devices can cope with this sort of speed. A typical USB stick will peak at a third of this speed. Lower priced sticks are often very slow indeed.
USB 3, where connectors have a blue section, improves things by a LARGE margin. Again, devices are rarely as fast as the standard allows. However a USB 3 stick often works a lot faster than a USB 2 one, even in a USB 2 socket.
Hint: If you are copying files to a USB device, don't leave Explorer pointing at that device. It will spend a lot of time updating the display to reflect the files being created there rather than allowing more data to be written.
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I have recently been trying to back up some data onto USB flash drives and am surprised to find just how slow the process is. About an hour to write a GB.
So I withdraw all I said about using using USB flash drives as extra RAM or hard disk space. Useless.
I gather that you can buy devices like USB drives but which internally are actually like SSD drives. They might be of some use.
Yes there are external SSD USB that you can buy, they are limited in speed depending upon the USB port version that is fitted to your Computer.
I bought a 2TB M2 SSD drive and an Enclosure in which I fitted it. It has a USB C outlet which connects to my PC or Macbook. The enclosure measures about 6mm thick by 30mm by 110mm
These M2 drives are now what tend to be fitted to new PC’s and it I wanted I could simply take mine out of its Enclosure and fit it into a spare socket in my PC. So it is as future proof as it can be as it is going to have all my Family History research on it.