Help with “C drive full” issue, please

[Davedrave]

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 )

Dave

[Zaphod99]

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

[Ashtone]

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/

[garden genie]

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?

[Spelk]

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.

[Davedrave]

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

[Raybistre]

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

[KGarrad]

Back in the dim, dark, distant past before Windows , 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!

[Davedrave]

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