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shallowdeep -> RE: computer question (8/6/2010 4:10:13 PM)
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A helpful first step would be to use a disk visualization tool, like the free WinDirStat, to identify what is actually taking up the space. I found a brief video that shows a bit about how to use it.
Media collections of music and, especially, video can be quite large; video can use upward of 1 GB per hour, depending on the quality. In all likelihood, you'll find it's those iTunes files that are consuming most of the space. If that's the case, I'd echo the advice to buy an external hard drive and transfer your media to it. Drives are reasonably inexpensive and , if you buy one, you'll still be able to use it with any new computer you finally get around to purchasing, so it won't be a wasted cost. Remember, having an external drive around to implement a regular backup policy is a very smart idea!
I would very strongly discourage you from using an iPod or similar device as the sole storage medium for your songs and video. If you lose or damage it, your files (and any investment in them) may be permanently lost. At the very least, make a backup to optical media.
There's also some possibility a program, like ZoneAlarm, is running amok and somehow eating all the free space. If that's the case, you should see a bunch of your disk being used up by it in WinDirStat; changing the offending program's preferences or removing and reinstalling it (or replacing it with an alternative) may fix things without resorting to a purchase of more storage right now.
Finally, the suggestion to defragment your drive is probably worth trying once you manage to clear some space up. A hard drive is very much a physical device, and filling it completely causes performance problems because the drive is forced to start spreading files over noncontiguous blocks, leading to much longer seek times whenever it needs to read or write. Defragmentation copies your data back into contiguous blocks, which alleviates this. Also, because a larger radius results in the platter spinning faster across the heads, outer tracks usually have better performance than inner ones; if the drive has to resort to using inner tracks, performance may decline some. Letting a hard drive fill up completely is generally not a good a idea for performance – something to keep in mind in the future.
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