laptop help

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chubbs111

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hoping someone will be able to help with a problem on my wifes laptop.please be gentle as my knowledge of computing is very poor,acer extensa 5235,originally had an academic program installed,took it to a so called laptop expert (ha ha)he said he had re installed windows 7 (previous copy was locked) she has had it back about 3 months and now decides to tell me its faulty,every day a balloon appears saying low disk space,i clicked on my computer and its showing a guage by disk d this guage is red and its nearly filled the bar,she doesnt have a windows 7 disk so is there anything i can do.
 
How big is the disk in GB?

Let me rephrase that. Do you have more than one drive listed in My Computer?

If so, right click on each one and then select properties and let me know how big each drive is and how much space there is on each drive. Please also state the drive letter of each drive (C, D, or E if you have them)
 
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Try running Disc cleanup. Not sure about it's location in Windows 7, but it's usually in Accessories / System Tools.

Might be worth running System Defrag as well. Also in Systems Tools.

Also clean up the browser cache. If you let us know which browser she uses someone will give you instructions as it varies from browser to browser.
 
local disc (c) used space 23.6 gb
free space 264 gb
capacity 288 gb
local disk (d) used space 9.75 gb
free space 15.5mb
capacity 9.7gb
 
OK so that is good news as your C drive is far from full and its your C drive that is of main concern.

Next question is what is your D drive used for? Have a look in there and see what files or applications are in there. It may be that this is a windows recovery partition or something that you don't actually use apart from in an emergency.
 
OK so that is good news as your C drive is far from full and its your C drive that is of main concern.

Next question is what is your D drive used for? Have a look in there and see what files or applications are in there. It may be that this is a windows recovery partition or something that you don't actually use apart from in an emergency.
i opened disk d and the following info came up
H-PC
Windows image back up
mediaID bin
 
A quick search shows that many were sold with a 250gb HD. This might have been swapped out at some stage? A clean install of Win7 will not use up anything like that. It could be that the expert did an install and kept your existing system in place.
 
OK so the fact that you have a file called MediaID Bin in that folder suggests that Microsoft backup has backed up files to the D drive.

So it sounds like the PC guy you used may have backed up your old image to the D drive before reinstalling windows. If you didnt receive messages about the disk being full for some time after the re-image then it sounds like you might still be automatically backing up to that drive on a schedule and now you are getting errors because the drive is full.

So, backups are a good thing.. I suggest you continue to do backups. It sounds like you should really backup somewhere else however, somewhere where you have lots more space. The quick and dirty option would be to simply purchase a cheap USB hard drive - your laptop only supports USB2 so no immediate need to buy a USB 3 drive but future proofing yourself by doing so is good.

You can get a cheap USB hard drive that has twice the storage of your laptop for little money. Here is one for £35 for example.

Samsung M3 500GB USB 3.0 Slimline Portable Hard Drive - Black: Amazon.co.uk: Computers & Accessories

Once you have your USB hard drive, you can go to Microsoft backup on your computer and schedule regular backups of your C and your D drive (to be on the safe side) and point it to backup the files on your new USB drive.

Meanwhile you can simply turn off warnings about your full D drive by following the below linked instructions. (be very careful when making chages in the registry)

Disable Low Disk Space Notification Alert In Windows 7 / Vista

Lastly, once you have completed a full backup to your new USB drive and you are confident that you have backed up both C and D then you can if you wish delete anything in the D drive as you have a backup elsewhere which can be restored at will if you required.
 
thank you very much spike,
ps havnt got round to having the wheels you give me re furbished,but will try and get them done after the new year
 
HP create a small partition on your HD where it stores backup copies of the computer BIOS.

New HP laptops will have it from the factory, and if the laptop was reinstalled at some point erasing the HP partition, then it will be recreated if/when the HP BIOS update utility is run.
 

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