PC HDD Over Capacity?

[Frezzato]

Interesting. I think this is my first advice forum question.

Anyway, I have a friend with an HP business desktop. I was helping her with something last week and her machine started slowing down, stuttering really. It would take several seconds for the cursor in Word to show up on the screen and any changes would take just as long to show up. I could hear the hard drive going crazy with activity so I checked its properties. Sure enough, it was 81% filled to capacity. Isn't the ultra-slow performance an obvious sign that her hard drive is too full? Here's the thing, she's got an HP business desktop running an i7 with 64-bit Windows 7, capable of running 16GB of RAM but currently configured with 4. Unfortunately her hard drive is--just 230GB! I couldn't believe she would buy a machine with such a small hard drive, especially considering she's in tech sales.

Anyway, I really suspect her HDD is full, but I wanted to know if buying a second hard drive would help with the problem. That is, if I get her a new drive, is there a way to start pointing applications to start saving to the second drive?

*I understand there are alternatives out there to ghost Windows to a new drive but I've read that they're not exactly perfect, so that's not an option.*

But my friend has 20 gigs of music and tons of pictures on her HDD, so could I just drag her My Pictures and My Music folders to the new drive to help her out? Or are those specific to the Windows directory, meaning they have to be located within her C drive? She also downloads a ton of documents, would I be able to drag the downloads folder to a new slaved drive?

For any responses, please quote me in your response. I'd like to get notifications of any replies. Thanks!

 

[Albino Boo]

choppity chop chop goes my axe

The drive drive still has 40 odd GB of free space, its not going to be impacting performance that much. It shouldn't be running when the machine is idle but if it is, then I suspect there is a malware issue. Try running anti virus scans and http://www.malwarebytes.org/




To be honest there isn't really a problem with taking a disk image and copying it to a larger hard drive. Here is how to move the folders


Open the Start menu and click your user name to open the User folder
Right-click the personal folder you want to redirect to another location.
Select Properties
Click the tab Location
The dialog box shown below will open
Click the button Move
An Explorer dialog Select a destination will open
Browse to the location where you want to redirect this folder. You can select another location on this computer, another drive attached to this computer, or another computer on the network
Click the folder where you want to store the files
Click the button Select Folder
Click OK
In the dialog that appears, click Yes to move all the files to the new location.

you can move all the following

Contacts
Desktop
(My) Documents
Downloads
Favorites
Links
(My) Music
(My) Pictures
Saved Games
Searches
(My) Videos

 

[Frezzato]

snip

Thank you. Yeah, I was looking up instructions and it seems that the amount of space I could free up by moving things like her pictures and music is...minimal at best. You're right, 40 gigs should be plenty of space. I suppose an easy test would be to transfer her music (20 gigs) to an external drive and see if that improves performance.

I think you're right about a virus scan as the subscription she had was long expired, though she's sent me tons of documents before and I haven't had any notifications pop up.

 

[Griffolion]

-snip-

A 230GB HDD in a 3.5" form factor will have the data quite spread out over the same size of platter as a 2TB one in the same form factor, this naturally leads to smaller HDD's being quite slow. Also, if it's older, it probably doesn't have great caching or other performance metrics.

But if you're noticing a slowdown from normal operation, and you're 80% full, it's not that it's full. The HDD still has plenty of space to be written to. Though I would suggest to de-frag her HDD, you may get some performance improvement there. And [a href="http://www.filehippo.com/download_ccleaner"]download this program[/a]. Run the temporary file cleaner and the registry sweeper. If it hasn't been cleaned before, you'll be amazed at how much space may get freed.

Next, her RAM is only 4GB. It may sound like enough, but if she's got a number of programs in the background then you'll get thrashing very soon. Best option here is either to get some more system memory, or to uninstall some programs she doesn't need.

More drastically, she may have some malware. You will probably want to install something like [a href="http://www.malwarebytes.org/"]MalwareBytes[/a], [a href="http://free.avg.com/us-en/homepage"]AVG[/a], or [a href="http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/security/pc-security/mse.aspx"]Microsoft Security Essentials[/a].

In my opinion, and if it was me helping her, I'd tell her to back up everything she needs to back up and then re-install Windows fresh. That's the most effective (and actually the easiest/most simple) way of solving a problem like this.

Hope you get it sorted anyway.

 

[Frezzato]

snip

It's funny you should mention all of that because that's exactly what I wanted to do. But my friend is in sales, specifically ranging from HP desktops/Blade servers to a new company regarding high-speed flash-based storage. So that's what makes her such a BAD recipient for help. It's like doctors being the worst patients.

Do you know if AVG provides active system protection or is it one-time scans, on demand only?

I use Avast! myself but it takes getting used to. I think perhaps I'll download Comodo for her as well, but it's kind of high maintenance. Yeah, there's a trend with the software I enjoy using. It has to be free (i.e. no subscriptions to expire) and run fairly autonomously after a set-up period.

 

[Griffolion]

-snip-

Yeah I get what you mean. On the other end of the scale are the clueless people who ask for help, and when you're trying to fix something they say things like, "Why are you trying that?!", as if I'm special needs. You asked me for help, lady! Haha.

I'm honestly not sure about AVG since I haven't used it in a little while. My peers still recommend it, but I personally use ESET Smart Security. It's a subscription so you won't like it, but I have simply not found a better solution for comprehensive protection. You may like it on the autonomous side of things, since it has continuous heuristical analysis of every incoming packet of data, checking it not only against its own signature database but against what it predicts will be the next permutation of a given virus signature. It also does continuous background scans of critical system files. And since they've done it all in assembly, it has a stupidly low footprint on your system resources. You think I'm a paid shill or something, but I've had ESS for 4 years now and I've never ever had a problem with it. The only issue I have is that the firewall can sometimes block games since it gets overly suspicious of traffic through certain ports. You just have to manually set it, and you're okay.

Spoiler: Anyway, if you're having trouble with her taking advice, just tell her that all your suggestions were backed up by me, who is qualified in PC repair