Help with laptop

[upsydaisy]

Hello there.

Am new on here and apols for justing arriving without introduction.

I wondered if anyone would be kind enough to give me some advice about my friend's laptop. It is 6 Gb hard drive. I Forget the ram and speed but about runs on XP - prob 4 years old - I can find out if need be.

Its so very slow, chugging its little heart out and is complaining of low memory all the time (dont we all). When you defrag it says its running on 5% and is too tired to defrag eeven. When you look at the analysis its just a mass of blue with v little white. She has hardly anything on there except MS office and a few free programs like spybot and some antivirus - is it avg and firewall Zone Alarm - none of which seem to be working/updating. No photos, no word docs nothing really that I can see.

 

The only other thing there is a D drive named back up with claims 2GB.

I cant figure why its so packed. Ive deleted tmps, she doesnt use the internet much so temp internet files and cookies arent the problem.

Can anyone help - could the free software be coflicting and causing the problems.

Many thanks

UD

[danzil]

we need a lot more spec...a 6 gb hard drive running xp is a little to little....10gb minimum really....

you could try partition magic to merge the d to the c.giving the os th e4full hard drive capacity...

alternativly you could get a bigger hard drive and clone the hard disk......saving installing everything again.....what is the make and model of this laptop...

danzil

[Jamey]

So, your friend's laptop has a 6 GB hard drive that is partitioned into a 4 GB system drive and a 2 GB backup? If you can't identify where the space is being consumed, I'd recommend you use a piece of free software called WinDirStat. This tool lets you graphically analyse and view your hard drive, allowing you to literally see what is taking up all that space.

 

Firstly, I'd recommend running the Disk Cleanup tool included with Windows. Then try CCleaner which removes a lot of the stuff Microsoft forgot. Then look at both of your drives with WinDirStat and you should be able to weed out the larger files and also the larger folders which are consuming so much space. Be careful what you delete; if you don't know what it is or why it is there, stay cautious and post what it is here.

 

One reason you may not be able to see what is taking up the space is that the files may be hidden. Here's how to show hidden files: Show Hidden Files.