My laptop has 2 drive partitions designated C & D. C is the OS part and D is everything else. Problem is that C tends to fill up very quickly and loading programs fails. What is the best way to keep the C drive clear of unneeded stuff and still have the PC run properly.
Use a Partition Manager or this trick I am in I/T and I used to have to resize, merge partitions often due to the small size of hard drives years ago. It's not a problem much anymore. However, I have seen laptops where the C drive is much smaller than the D which I don't understand and where the C was filling up. I used to use Partition Magic which worked wonderfully but not sold anymore I don't think. I just did a quick search and there are still tools out there such as MiniTool Partition Wizard Home Edition 7.1 and which appears to be free. I would do a cnet.com search for partition managers that are FREE and rate high. Backup your data first as these things can fail and render your C drive unbootable. A trick I use now instead or merging or resizing partitions is to "trick" the My Documents folder to reside on the D drive. That is if the My Docs folder is using alot of space. It's simple to do. First Create a folder called My Documents on the D drive. Then right click on the My Documents or Documents (windows 7) folder in the Start Menu (NOT the one you just created on D drive.) Click Properties and change the location of the folder by typing the path of the My Docs folder on the D drive, for instance "D:\My Documents" without the quotes. You will then be asked if you want to move your current docs to the new location and you say YES. This will free up your C drive by the amount of data that was in your C drive Docs.
You might also want to try turning *off* hibernation mode and remove the hiberfil.sys, which can eat up a lot of your OS drive space: http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/it...-by-disabling-windows-hibernate-function/1493
On most laptops the partition on the hard drive, other than "C", is the recovery partition. They don't provide disks with units any more. The second drive is typically much smaller than "C". What some people think is unnecessary data on that drive, have deleted any chance of recovery without buying a new OS disk, and totally complicated the driver installations for a recovery. That drive also needs space to expand compressed files for the recovery. Adding too much data to the drive can cause a fail in the recovery process. List the specifics on your "C" & "D" drive sizes. "Used & Free" If you don't know how: Right click the drive letter and choose "properties".
In all of the newer laptops I've seen where the hd is partioned the D: drive is always alot smaller than the C: drive, as the D: partition is usually only used to store the re-install software should you need to restore your laptop back to factory default. Honestly have never seen one done the other way around.
When installing a program choose the D partition for the program files. That is a best practice that is used on Domain controllers and app servers. It usualy keeps the c partition for windows files only.
