My C drive is full on my old HP Pavillion ze4500. Bought external, but can't move enough to it!

[pink-o]

My Seagate E drive holds 149 Gigs, and 145 are free. My C hard drive holds 27.9 and only 500 mgs are free. I have a huge library on ITunes, but I'm scared to move it to the empty drive. Also, I have ITunes updates from 2005 taking up space in my programs! But if I delete those, will that mess up my current ITunes?

Also, how to I set "drive E" as my default download drive? I'd love for all the temporary internet files et al to go there so I don't have to keep defragging.

Or is it hopeless? Should I just get a new computer? I've had mine for about 4 years now!

[canetoad]

1. First, moving the itunes library

Why don't you copy it to the new drive, make sure it is working, then delete the original. That way you have a fall-back if anything goes wrong.

Setting E: as download drive: This needs to be done program by program. I can't tell you much about iTunes, as I don't use it, but most programs that are capable of downloading stuff, browsers included, have somewhere in their options a dialogue for you to choose which drive or folder your downloaded stuff goes to. For example, in Firefox, the main tab has an option 'Save Downloaded files to...' then you browse and choose a location. Bit torrent clients have the same option.

If you have the current iTunes installed, I can't see why deleting the old updates should have any effect, but someone more conversant with iTunes may have a better answer.

[Duer 157099]

2. There are several options, none of which involve a new computer

First, about the downloads folder: if you're using Firefox, go Tools>Options>Main>Downloads and you can choose the directory there. For IE, I suppose it's similar, but not sure exactly.

Second, what I do when I have a similar situation (smallish C drive) is to make a partition on the larger drive (specifics depend on which OS you use, winxp?) and use that for, example, my Program Files. The way to do that is I setup an empty folder under C: and name it something like "Program Files Alt" and then go to Computer Management/Disk Management and right click on the partition I want to use for that and select "Change Drive and Path" and then Add, and select "Mount in an empty NTFS folder" and browse to the empty folder I just made on C.

That way, when I install programs, I always install them into the second Program File folder, which actually sits on the big drive so doesn't take up space on my C drive.

That might not be clear enough, if so, just ask more.

(also there are other options available, i'm sure more will post with other thoughts)

[pink-o]

3. Thanx! I'll check both those options out right now! n/t

[BlueJazz]

4. One MAIN thing to keep in mind that...since your hard drive is four years old...

...your drive could fail at any time. (I say this because if you've been downloading a lot of files ...plus using your computer a lot)...your Hard-drive is close to ending it's service life.

If you just had a few files and stuff that wasn't hard to replace, this might not be an issue, but downloading 140 gig (or so) must have taken a LOT of time.

You really need to back-up your stuff ...on maybe an external drive.