HELP ME!!!!! HEEEEELLLLLLP MEEEEEE!!! (Computer retard alert)

[Mr. Flopnuts]

Okay. So I have this laptop. It's a Dell, dude. And it has a 500gb HD. I have about 60gb on it, and I'm completely out of space and fucked. How is that you ask? Because whoever set it up at Best Buy has it set up that everything saves on my OS C drive, rather than my D Local Disk drive. Probably not a big deal, and easy to fix, but I can't find shit on google that's in English. Please, help. Please....

[DaFace]

That's a fairly typical setup actually. But it can be pretty confusing for people who aren't used to it.

First of all, what's taking up most of your space? Is it stuff in My Documents, music, downloads from a browser?

The basic idea is, move whatever that is over to your D drive. But I can tell you better ways to do it after I know what it is that's causing the issue.

[Mr. Flopnuts]

All of my programs that I download off of the internet is in the C drive. I've tried to move them, or repartition them to go to the D drive, but I can't. It's weird. Really, with my ignorance, and the shit going on with this fucker, I want to reset it to factory conditions, but I can't even find a way to do that. It's ridiculous.

[bevischief]

Okay. So I have this laptop. It's a Dell, dude. And it has a 500gb HD. I have about 60gb on it, and I'm completely out of space and ****ed. How is that you ask? Because whoever set it up at Best Buy has it set up that everything saves on my OS C drive, rather than my D Local Disk drive. Probably not a big deal, and easy to fix, but I can't find shit on google that's in English. Please, help. Please....

That was your first mistake was trusting Bestbuy...

[bevischief]

What do you run for anti-virus?

[Mr. Flopnuts]

That was your first mistake was trusting Bestbuy...

I figure it was some funny joke the guy did in the back to set it up where all programs go into the recovery drive.

I tried just moving them, but it doesn't offer drive D. It just offers desktop, and shit like that.

[Mr. Flopnuts]

What do you run for anti-virus?

HItman pro. This thing has an i5 quad core processor, and takes something like 5 minutes to boot up. It's ridiculous.

[bevischief]

Don't about that one but might try downloading Malwarebytes from another pc and load it in safe mode and let it run. Something doesn't right here. After running that download microsoft essentials instead and get rid of hitman pro.

[Mr. Flopnuts]

Tougher than I thought, I guess.

[DaFace]

All of my programs that I download off of the internet is in the C drive. I've tried to move them, or repartition them to go to the D drive, but I can't. It's weird. Really, with my ignorance, and the shit going on with this fucker, I want to reset it to factory conditions, but I can't even find a way to do that. It's ridiculous.

Unless you have a really weird situation, I'd still install new programs into C:\program files\, which is the default. Unless you've got some crazy huge programs, all of your Windows files and program files will be fine on C.

The big thing is that you want to make sure any of your own files that are huge are going to D. For starters, change the download location settings in your web browser to something like D:\Downloads (or whatever you prefer).

If you're the type to store all your stuff in My Documents, you'll also want to move that folder over. Here's a tutorial (http://headstrongfarm.hubpages.com/hub/Windows-7_-_Moving_My_Documents) on how to do that in Windows 7.

Finally, if you just can't figure out where all your space is going, download and run WinDirStat (http://windirstat.info/). It'll show you how much space is being used by various files. Be careful about deleting things just because they're big - Windows files themselves are gonna be a big chunk of it - but it might lead you to a folder that's unnecessary that's too large.

Good luck.

(P.S. If all this fails, you can technically increase the size of your C: partition, but you may want someone to help you with that - you can really screw up your computer if an operation like that messes up.)

[Dave Lane]

Seriously, back up and reformat re- install your hard drive. One partition is the best way to go. If you're in KC bring it by and I'll help ya fix it

[phisherman]

Or you could just install Partition Magic and combine all of your partitions.

[ReynardMuldrake]

Or you could just install Partition Magic and combine all of your partitions.

If it's two logical partitions on a single disk, yeah, you'll pretty much have to use 3rd party partitioning software or reformat and start over. Sucks that they did that without telling you.

[QuikSsurfer]

What's up with all the AV and reformat talk?
Kinda strange that you can't move data from c: to d: --- I assume they're both the same file system...
Seems as simple as going to each program (browsers) and changing the download path to "d:\downloads".
How large are the partitions? Is anything on your storage (d:\) drive? What OS - XP, Vista, 7?
If you're running Windows 7 - changing your libraries (docs,pics,music,etc) over to another partition is very easy.

[QuikSsurfer]

Seriously, back up and reformat re- install your hard drive. One partition is the best way to go. If you're in KC bring it by and I'll help ya fix it

Putting your windows OS on a separate partition from other data is actually preferred.. In the event of a catastrophe, reloading a windows image and still having all other data intact on another partition -- that sounds good, right?

[Mr. Laz]

right click file > move to > browse to folder on different partition

you should have a choice of where files are saved to when you download them. Your browser download default location is c:\downloads or something but you can change that by going into options.

Tell me which browser you are using and i'll will tell you where the options are.

be careful about deleting partitions etc until you know for sure whether it has a recovery partition or not because you don't want to delete that. In fact if your partition is already full it's probably because you are saving to the recovery partition which isn't very big.

[Buck]

Is your D drive not the DVD drive?

[DaFace]

Putting your windows OS on a separate partition from other data is actually preferred.. In the event of a catastrophe, reloading a windows image and still having all other data intact on another partition -- that sounds good, right?

This. It's easier for non-techy people to understand using just one drive, but from a tech standpoint, it's a hell of a lot easier to deal with it if there's a separate drive for data.

[Imon Yourside]

I always reformat to a c drive that is big enough to hold the OS plus an additional 15gb for temp files and use a much larger D drive to store files. This situation also allow for easy system reformats which if you're using windows is necessary about once a year. Problem is if your using Windows 7 the Windows/winsxs directory grows and will eventually force you to reformat because there isn't any way to shrink it. I have a 32 gb SSD drive for my OS and the winsxs directory started about 200 megs and after 5 months is currently at 7+ gigs and growing. If anyone can figure out how to shrink that directory please clue me in.

[Mr. Flopnuts]

I'm on my phone. I'll work on this when I get to my laptop. I just wanted to say thank you to everyone offering help. Much appreciated.