[spinningwoman]

Hi - I've had a Dell mini 9 for a few years. I was mainly using it when I travelled. At one time I had it working well with a limited set of software I used for work etc. But then it got so full on drive C I couldn't do anything without scraping around to delete temp files etc. And now I have tried to delete just about everything but it doesn't seem to make much difference to the disk space. I got it up to 127mb free but then when I next booted up it was back down to 27mb! have Panda cloud AV running which I could remove, but I put that on because it was smaller than the AVG I had been using.

I am probably going to upgrade to a 32GB ssd but I am puzzled where the space went and why I can't seem to get it back. Is it windows that has bloated through updates etc? Could it be the Panda? I've used spacesniffer but can't see any obvious culprits. One thing is the preinstalled Vodaphone software which I no longer use but can't seem to delete using ccleaner.

It is such a neat little machine. I thought I'd just retire it and get a new netbook with a bigger HD but after finding this forum I'm keen to keep it if possible.

When I use Ccleaner various Windows packs show up and I don't know if they are part of windows and have to be kept or if they are the 'update packs' and can now be deleted.

Thanks
Karen

[lswartz]

I am guessing that you have Win XP. A clean install would get rid of the windows accumulation that has occurred over the years & speed up the OS nicely. I use a small SDHC in my Mini 9 for all file storage & still have almost a GB left on the SSD. You might consider getting a SDHC 1st, I saw a 32 GB listed yesterday for about $20.

[spinningwoman]

I have a 16gb sdhc in there already and use that for temp Internet files, storage etc. the prob is that windows wont let me use that for my documents folder or for Dropbox. Also I was so short of space on c that I couldn't even install something on a different drive because there is always some file it seems to want on c for many things and everything I did got interrupted by messages telling me I was dangerously short of space.

However, in another thread here I discovered I could delete a directory of stuff for a windows restore, so I moved that onto the sdhc and now have almost half a gb! So that is more workable.

I had already ordered the 32gb ssd, so when that arrives I will install it and start reinstalling some of the stuff I deleted (like iTunes and maybe Office)

---------- Post added at 05:28 PM ---------- Previous post was at 05:27 PM ----------

If I did reinstall xp, how do I make sure it is nice and lean?

[lswartz]

Hehe, that is a good question. I try to avoid windows as much as possible so I can't give you much help there. You can also use small flash drives that don't stick out as far as the normal ones.

You just gave me a new reason for why I like Linux, as I can direct my downloads to the SDHC automatically & save my office files there as well. Truthfully, I think you can save your word or excel files directly to the SDHC as well, you have to do a 'save as' & tell it where.

[rrfranczak3]

buy a 1010 or something that is NOT restricted to SSD's, I currently have a 750gb drive in my 1010 and will soon be upgrading to a 1 Terabyte drive, I laugh at disk space, I can run Motor Vehicles off my system if I want, I got 600gig set aside for Win 7 and almost another 100gb for Win XP, I got more sh*t on this thing than most people have on their desktops and with the 2gb upgrade of RAM everything runs fairly smoothly....Good Luck to ya though

[ChipperJones]

No need for a hardware upgrade with the cloud looming. Try and take advantage of one of the many cloud options available nowadays, dropbox, google drive, the list goes on and on!