Free up some disk space . You should have at least 20% free.

If your drive is formatted as NTFS another potential gain arises with
your operating system on  your C drive. In the Windows Directory of
your C partition you will have some Uninstall folders in your Windows
folder  typically: $NtServicePackUninstall$ and $NtUninstallKB282010$
etc. These files may be compressed or not compressed. If compressed
the text of the folder name appears in blue characters. If not
compressed you can compress them. Right click on each folder and
select Properties, General, Advanced and check the box before Compress
contents to save Disk Space. On the General Tab you can see the amount
gained by  deducting the size on disk from the size. Folder
compression is only an option on a NTFS formatted drive / partition.

The default allocation to System Restore is 12% on your C partition
which is over generous. I would reduce it to 700 mb. Right click your My
Computer icon on the Desktop and select System Restore. Place the cursor
on your C drive select Settings but this time find the slider and drag
it to the left until it reads 700 mb and exit. When you get to the
Settings screen click on Apply and OK and exit.

Another default setting which could be wasteful is that for temporary
internet files, especially if you do not store offline copies on disk.
The default allocation is 3% of drive. Depending on your attitude to
offline copies you could reduce this to 1% or 2%. In Internet Explorer
select Tools, Internet Options, General, Temporary Internet Files,
Settings to make the change. At the same time look at the number of days
history is held.

The default allocation for the Recycle Bin is 10 % of drive. Change to
5%, which should be sufficient. In Windows Explorer place the cursor
on your Recycle Bin, right click and select Properties, Global and
move the slider from 10% to 5%. However, try to avoid letting it get
too full as if it is full and you delete a file by mistake it will
bypass the Recycle Bin and be gone for ever.

Select Start, All Programs, Accessories, System Tools, Disk CleanUp to
Empty your Recycle Bin and Remove Temporary Internet Files. Also
select Start, All Programs, accessories, System Tools, Disk CleanUp,
More Options, System Restore and remove all but the latest System
Restore point. Run Disk Defragmenter.

Select Start, All Programs, Accessories, System Tools, System
Information, Tools, Dr Watson and verify that the box before "Append to
existing log" is NOT checked. This means the next time the log is
written it will overwrite rather than add to the existing file.

The default maximum size setting for Event Viewer logs is too large.
Reset the maximum for each log from 512 kb to 128 kb and set it to
overwrite.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308427/en-us

--
Regards.

Gerry
~~~~
FCA
Stourport, England
Enquire, plan and execute
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Gerry and Patrick,

My computer is a desktop computer and not a laptop. I do have an
external drive in use at the moment for movies and pictures and sound
editing. I will look into seeing if the computer can take another
internal drive. Thanks for that suggestion.

In another post to a group, I was told about an amazing program. This
program shows you in colours what programs are on the disc and how
much size they are taking up. This has really helped clean up the
disc. I had one program that I didn't even know was there as it was a
duplicate copy of something on an external drive and was taking up
4.02GB!

I highly recommend the following to anyone needing to check over their
hard drive space:

http://w3.win.tue.nl/nl/onderzoek/onderzoek_informatica/visualization/sequoiaview/