bibliobabe Posted January 27, 2009 Share Posted January 27, 2009 OK, I have been on the same PC for awhile (like 3 years) and it's getting more and more full I think (how do I check this)? Lately (after finding SG) I have been experiencing performance issues with PSE closing down, also in the last week (after some SG shopping) several of my websites have not been remembering my cookies. For example, eBay, Facebook, and yes, my dears, SG have all been asking me to log in each time even though I say remember me. The true question here...is this spelling impending doom for a hard drive crash? Should I put an EHD on rush order? I am moving all of my SG files to CD as I type this to try to free up some space. I know SG will let me download my SB stuff again, which is a pain but fine, but I am worried about the PC getting so stressed out from my SG files that it crashes and my photos go with it. Most are on Kodak Gallery but not all! Also - I found a carbonite CD at my office that came with our Quicken legal documents maker. Is this the same that everyone keeps referring to? OR to which everyone keeps referring, if you will? I know work would let me have it, should I take them up on that as well? Cheers! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LisaL Posted January 27, 2009 Share Posted January 27, 2009 If you go to my computer and right click on your c: drive and select properties it should show you the status of your drive. If you have not defraged your drive recently, you should. And yes, I would get a EHD if you can. CD back ups just in case is a must. I have been backing all my stuff up over the past few nights. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bibliobabe Posted January 27, 2009 Author Share Posted January 27, 2009 If you go to my computer and right click on your c: drive and select properties it should show you the status of your drive. If you have not defraged your drive recently, you should. And yes, I would get a EHD if you can. CD back ups just in case is a must. I have been backing all my stuff up over the past few nights. eee! It says total space 50.4G, free space 7.30G! Could this be slowing me down? How do I defrag? I will do that after I'm done writing my CD's. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LisaL Posted January 27, 2009 Share Posted January 27, 2009 Go to all programs/accessories/system tools/defrag This could take several hours. I did mine over night last night. And yes...this could have a major impact on your system speed. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bibliobabe Posted January 27, 2009 Author Share Posted January 27, 2009 Go to all programs/accessories/system tools/defrag This could take several hours. I did mine over night last night. And yes...this could have a major impact on your system speed. Lisa you are awesome! I am a believer - I will get my EHD soon and defrag tonight...thanks! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pab Posted January 27, 2009 Share Posted January 27, 2009 Terri, what kind of computer are you using? With only that much free space left you will run out of space in no time, if you do any digital scrapping at all. If you are saving your pages in PSD format they average 130 MB. It takes 1000 to make one Gig, so if you do the math you see they will eat up your free space quick. If you save in JPEG and delete the PSD files that will help but then it's not as easy to go back and add or change something if you want. There a couple more things someone should do regularly to help keep their PC cleaned up and running better, if that's what you have a PC, I'm not sure if it 's the same for a MAC as I don't have one yet. On top of defragging you should do a disk clean up 1x a week. You go open My Computer and right click on your main drive (usually C). In the dialog box that comes up you should see properties at the bottom of the list, click on that. Then there's a picture of how much used and free space you have left in a pie format. right beside that is a little box that says Disk Cleanup, click on that. You then choose what areas to empty. I always empty all but the Setup Log Files and Catalog files for the Content Indexer (don't know what those are yet). Click on Okay, it doesn't take to long. Then two other files that should be emptied twice a week are found by going to the start menu and clicking on Run for Windows XP (In Vista you type it in the search after clicking on start) Type in %temp% and hit ok for XP, enter for Vista. It is going to bring you up a window with files in it. Highlight them all and delete. Secondly follow same instructions but type in prefetch. Then same thing, highlight all and delete. I had my computer for four years when a tech shared this with me and I had over 60,000 files that needed to be deleted in the temp folder alone!! Don't worry if it tells you something can't be deleted, just skip that file and do the rest. My internet browser ran so much faster after doing this. I do it weekly now. There's also one more step but this may be overwhelming enough so let me know if you want to know how to have your computer find errors and fix... Hope this helps... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
April Showers Posted January 27, 2009 Share Posted January 27, 2009 If you go to my computer and right click on your c: drive and select properties it should show you the status of your drive. If you have not defraged your drive recently, you should. And yes, I would get a EHD if you can. CD back ups just in case is a must. I have been backing all my stuff up over the past few nights. eee! It says total space 50.4G, free space 7.30G! Could this be slowing me down? How do I defrag? I will do that after I'm done writing my CD's. I believe you need to have 10% of your disk free to defrag. You might need to pull off a few things or uninstall programs you never use. Also check your temp files and clean them out if necessary, and be sure to empty your recycle bin. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
April Showers Posted January 27, 2009 Share Posted January 27, 2009 And with that size of a drive, I would move an EHD up on the shopping list. It really isn't a very big hard drive. If you can afford it, I'd suggest you go buy an EHD and move the files over to it. Then defrag. It would be faster. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ristmar Posted January 27, 2009 Share Posted January 27, 2009 Terri, what kind of computer are you using? With only that much free space left you will run out of space in no time, if you do any digital scrapping at all. If you are saving your pages in PSD format they average 130 MB. It takes 1000 to make one Gig, so if you do the math you see they will eat up your free space quick. If you save in JPEG and delete the PSD files that will help but then it's not as easy to go back and add or change something if you want. There a couple more things someone should do regularly to help keep their PC cleaned up and running better, if that's what you have a PC, I'm not sure if it 's the same for a MAC as I don't have one yet. On top of defragging you should do a disk clean up 1x a week. You go open My Computer and right click on your main drive (usually C). In the dialog box that comes up you should see properties at the bottom of the list, click on that. Then there's a picture of how much used and free space you have left in a pie format. right beside that is a little box that says Disk Cleanup, click on that. You then choose what areas to empty. I always empty all but the Setup Log Files and Catalog files for the Content Indexer (don't know what those are yet). Click on Okay, it doesn't take to long. Then two other files that should be emptied twice a week are found by going to the start menu and clicking on Run for Windows XP (In Vista you type it in the search after clicking on start) Type in %temp% and hit ok for XP, enter for Vista. It is going to bring you up a window with files in it. Highlight them all and delete. Secondly follow same instructions but type in prefetch. Then same thing, highlight all and delete. I had my computer for four years when a tech shared this with me and I had over 60,000 files that needed to be deleted in the temp folder alone!! Don't worry if it tells you something can't be deleted, just skip that file and do the rest. My internet browser ran so much faster after doing this. I do it weekly now. There's also one more step but this may be overwhelming enough so let me know if you want to know how to have your computer find errors and fix... Hope this helps... Thanks SO much for this tip. I tried it on my laptop that I've had for just about a year now and it freed up LOADS of space. I've had my desktop for a lot longer and will be doing it on that as soon as I can. Thanks again for sharing. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bibliobabe Posted January 27, 2009 Author Share Posted January 27, 2009 Thanks Lisa, April, and Patsy!! I have my homework tonight!! I will get the EHD asap and move the pics and rest of DSB supplies onto it. I need it for the portability as well. I think I'm going to go w/ the Seagate Go 500GB, Amazon has it on sale for ~$130 which seems to be a good price. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dawn51 Posted January 27, 2009 Share Posted January 27, 2009 I would check newegg.com - I saw a 1TB on there last week for $109.00. I bought a Maxtor 500gb at Staples a couple of months ago for 89.99. dawn Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LisaL Posted January 27, 2009 Share Posted January 27, 2009 I love my seagate 500 portable. It was the one I read the best reviews about and it was perfect to with my Laptop for travel. It was a little more, but since it is one of my main sources for back up I wanted one of the better ones. I read some really bad reviews about some of the others. I velcro'd mine to the top of my laptop. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bibliobabe Posted January 27, 2009 Author Share Posted January 27, 2009 I love my seagate 500 portable. It was the one I read the best reviews about and it was perfect to with my Laptop for travel. It was a little more, but since it is one of my main sources for back up I wanted one of the better ones. I read some really bad reviews about some of the others. I velcro'd mine to the top of my laptop. docking station or no docking station? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DDecker Posted January 27, 2009 Share Posted January 27, 2009 Another thing you can check into is a bigger hard drive for your computer. When I upgraded to my bigger hard drive I purchased an enclosure for the one I took out. They make them for both laptop and desktop hard drives and it turns them into a USB external hard drive. What is really nice is you don't have to move any files, use them right from the drive and if you have a hard drive failure you can put the old one back in and eliminate down time. You would ofcourse need to install your OS and programs on the new drive but you can easily get a 250G for around $100! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lorac Posted January 27, 2009 Share Posted January 27, 2009 One other thing you should also check is the amount of RAM or memory that your pc has. I have 3GB of memory on my new pc, up from 1.5GB on my old pc, which has a 500GB hard drive, up from 160GB on my old one. I also have a Seagate EHD that is 750GB. I'm looking into getting a 1TB EHD sometime this year. With all of my scrapbooking supplies and photos, my EHD is filling up fast. I only keep program files and SG supplies on my internal HD, everything else goes to my EHD. What I really need to do is backup all of my photos and supplies on CD's. Need to buy a stack of them. Cleaned out my EHD and HD a couple of weeks ago and moved so much over to my EHD. I also, by accident, deleted my Webshots collections and for some strange reason they couldn't be found on my Carbonite backup. Carbonite is checking into that now for me. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hdevino Posted January 28, 2009 Share Posted January 28, 2009 Thank you ladies so much. This thread has been so helpful. I just (today) replaced my 512 MB RAM cards with 1 GB RAM cards. So now I have 2 GB of RAM. But I'm still worried about the free space on my hard drive. I also only have about 50 GB of space and only about 15 GB of free space. I had an EHD that has all of my completed PSD files and PNG supplies on it. So that's not the issue. I just have a lot of programs I like to use on my hard drive and I don't want to get rid of anything. Thinking of upgrading to a bigger hard drive for my Dell Inspiron E1705. Is this possible? Is it hard to install? I didn't have too much of a problem installing RAM. I'm also concerned because I don't have a separate scratch disk for PSE but I don't have my c drive partitioned and don't know how to do that. Any tips? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bibliobabe Posted February 6, 2009 Author Share Posted February 6, 2009 Woohoo! got my Seagate go 500G today! Now I'm moving everything off of CD's and the 3 computers I use to get ORGANIZED! I am so pumped! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LisaL Posted February 6, 2009 Share Posted February 6, 2009 Are you using a laptop? Don't forget the velcro strips to fasten it to your lid! It works perfect! See picture below! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
April Showers Posted February 6, 2009 Share Posted February 6, 2009 Thank you ladies so much. This thread has been so helpful. I just (today) replaced my 512 MB RAM cards with 1 GB RAM cards. So now I have 2 GB of RAM. But I'm still worried about the free space on my hard drive. I also only have about 50 GB of space and only about 15 GB of free space. I had an EHD that has all of my completed PSD files and PNG supplies on it. So that's not the issue. I just have a lot of programs I like to use on my hard drive and I don't want to get rid of anything. Thinking of upgrading to a bigger hard drive for my Dell Inspiron E1705. Is this possible? Is it hard to install? I didn't have too much of a problem installing RAM. I'm also concerned because I don't have a separate scratch disk for PSE but I don't have my c drive partitioned and don't know how to do that. Any tips? Heather, You can replace the hard drive in your laptop with a larger one. And I'm not one to judge how hard it is, because everything looks really easy and fast for Bob. A few screws, and it plugs in. You do have to make sure it is set right, and while your laptop won't have another drive in it, if you get a big one, you can partition it to make a second drive. Sorry I can't tell you how to do it, and Bob is asleep. We have 2 Inspirons, and Bob swapped out the hard drive on our first one for a much larger drive and turned the old one into an EHD. Not a really big one-- I gave it to my brother for Christmas. Don't tell Might not be something you can do yourself. But when Bob was changing my laptop from Vista to XP he took out the original drive and put in a new one we bought to try it out with. It took a few nights, and each night he would pop the original drive back in so I had a working laptop. When he was sure everything was working right, he wiped out the old one. You should be able to copy your hard drive to your new one-- then just plug it in. It may take special software though. Good Luck! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PhotoshopScrapper Posted February 6, 2009 Share Posted February 6, 2009 Replacing a laptop HD is definitely easy. I did this last month. To help anyone else out ... here are the steps I took... 1. buy nice big ehd. I bought a desktop internal HD and an enclosure for it from newegg (I got a 1TB and enclosure for about $140 total). Cheaper than buying something packaged and sold as an EHD and you get more space. 2. buy Acronis (yes Ro talks about it all the time - this made the move so incredibly easy). 3. after formatting your new EHD, install Acronis and back up the entire current internal HD to the EHD. It will create one file on the EHD that will have EVERYTHING on it, your operating system, all your programs, all your files right down to the cache in your browser. 4. google your specific laptop to find out how to change out the HD. Typically this requires removing the battery and power cords, unscrewing a few screws, taking out HD, removing the holder from the HD, putting new one in holder and replacing it into the machine. 5. Boot with Acronis CD and do a restore. You will have to adjust the partition size at this point so that you have use of the entire new HD. This took me about 4 hours tops (and most of the time I was doing other things in the house while the machine was doing what it had to do without me). 2 hours to back up the HD, 15 minutes to install new HD, 2 hours to do the restore. I was replacing an 80GB HD with a 320GB. Once the above steps are complete, all you have to do is boot up the machine and you have elbow room on your new HD. BTW - to defrag you need at least 15% free space on a Windows XP machine. You SHOULD keep between 20 and 30% free on any HD to allow for swap space needed by programs ... especially addicts like us that are digi-scrapping with huge files to show for it. I suggest (if you can create the space on your current HD) you defrag before doing the upgrade. The cleaner you get your original HD before the upgrade, the more useful your back up will be. Probably not a bad idea to run it through your virus software as well before doing the backup. If there is by any chance a virus on your current HD and you don't clean it, you will only be transferring it to the new one. I also bought Acronis from newegg. At the time they were having a rebate on it. It cost me a whopping $20 when all was said and done and it was worth EVERY penny. Hope this helps! Denise Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bibliobabe Posted February 7, 2009 Author Share Posted February 7, 2009 Why does my freeagent seagate say total space is only 465G when I bought 500G? Where is the rest? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PhotoshopScrapper Posted February 7, 2009 Share Posted February 7, 2009 This is normal. I'm not exactly sure why it does this but every drive does. It's nothing to worry about. Denise Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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