Help with “C drive full” issue, please

[Biggles50]

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.

[Davedrave]

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

[andrewalston]

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.

[Spelk]

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.

[andrewalston]

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.

[Biggles50]

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.