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Hello, I just moved and I decided to leave my newest cpu with my little brother for a few months. I brought my old cpu with me. It's a pentium 2. 192mb of Ram and 40gb. My problem is I keep getting drive c has ran out of space. I check my cpu's memory and it's 65% free. I check my hard drive space and I have 1gb of free space. I've had much less hard drive space without getting any warnings. I've searched around and I've read ways to tweak memories. Unfortunately, I don't understand all that and I'm afraid I'll mess something up. So my question to you guys, is there a safe/trusted program that can free up ram and hard drive space? Like a program that can help manage it better or help me get more virtual memory than I have. I hope I'm being specific. I don't know why I'm getting ran out of disk space error? I have 1 gb, I'm not running any new programs, I'm not running anything except explorer, dsl, and a file share program that I've used for years. I know the file share program takes up some memory but it still says I have 65% system resources free. I've ran my virus software, spy-bot, etc...... Any advice for this rookie would be greatly appreciated. Once again I don't understand all those commands you guys give so if there's a program I can use that would be nice. I screwed up my cpu before trying to tweak things, so I'd rather try a trusted program that can do that for me. Sorry for this long thread and thanks!
Hi,
To free up some RAM use a great free program called "Free Ram Optimizer XP". Go here for it http://www.download.com/Free-Ram-Optimizer-XP/3000-2086_4-10238480.html?tag=lst-0-1.
For making the Virtual Memory bigger, you'll have to let me know what Windows version your running. Under Xp you click Start/Control Panel/Performance and Maintenance/System/Advanced Tab/Settings(Under Performance)/Advanced Tab/Change/Try increasing it by about 30%
It is probably the Virtual Memory thats the prob.
Daz
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Sorry! Just noticed you running 95/98 :( It should be very similar in getting to Virtual Memory. Somebody with your o/s should help you.
p.s you can still use "Free Ram Optimizer XP" or "FreeRAM XP Pro 1.4" - both are free
Daz
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Thanks very much Dazman and Renaissance Man. I'm about to download those programs and hopefully that will work! I'm using windows 98se, thanks very much!
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40Gb with only 1Gb left. That is a lot of stuff you have there on that drive. Surely there must be some things that would not be missed. Especially since you haven't been using that hard drive. This stuff was not missed during that time.
If the problem is related to Virtual memory then increasing it will not help because there is not enough free space on the drive now to accomodate it's size.
If anything, let Windows manage it for you.Freeing or optimizing RAM is only going to force Windows to use more of the hard drive space that you don't have available.
Out of curiosity (or nosey) what is taking up 40Gb of hard drive space...a bazillion .mp3 files?
I have been using my C: partition for over 5 years and only have <6Gb of stuff on it. (I have other partitions with stuff like .mp3 files and images and program installers; all the stuff that does not need to be on the C: partition.)Bryan
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It sounds as though the space on C: is being reported incorrectly.
Run a thorough (include surface scan) scandisk on drive C:. If it hangs in windows, boot with a bootdisk and run the dos version of scandisk, again, include the surface scan.
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I'd go with response 6. Looks like error with reporting free space. Scandisk must fix that. The through scan will let you know if your hard drive is conking, in which case you will have plenty of funny errors.
With 1GB free space virtual memory problem is ruled out IF it is left to windows managed swap file.btw, many thanks to Rennaisance man for the response to my thread in the ME forum. I have disabled system restore and deleted the PCHealth folder. By the looks of it will revert back to 98 or dual boot this with XP or 2k. Thanks :)
Good Luck and Happy Computing,
Kailas Shastry,
A brave man is a fool in the midst of cowards.<b
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RAM is there to be used. Up to a point Windows will gobble up RAM each time you increase it, in order to give you max speed. Wanting to have spare RAM is a bit like driving at 30mph in case you ever want to go at 70mph.
RAM clearing programs are normally a waste of time and space. Yonks ago I had those things and the machine worked better without them. There have been many sensible explanations on this topic on this board by WhipPhil - use Search.
You don't state your OS (or maybe I missed it) but certainly on W98 there is little point doing other than letting Windows manage Virtual memory. You can set a minimum in system.ini if you wish. This can sometimes be beneficial but not in terms of your problem.
Setting ConservativeSwapFile=1 in system.ini can sometimes speed up the issue (search Google on this or my post will be a mile long). Again, it is not related in any way to your problem though, so for the time being I'd lay off the tweaks.
"Please" don't take this the wrong way but CPU (Central Processing Unit) means the processor module itself.
I rather think you mean Computer (the whole darned box). Just that it helps if terminology is right....Looks like you've already been given the pointers to fix your problem, hope it goes well.
Derek.W
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Yeah edit the line into your system.ini as Derek suggests. That line should be edited into the [386Enh] section.
I'm not sure how much windows will allow a swap file to balloon with 192 of RAM on a 40 gig drive. But that, along with any temp files, may be the reason.
You can manually set a maximum swap file size by going to performance in system in control panel and clicking 'virtual memory'.
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Dave/Samantha
If you set a Max on your swap file you might crash or have problems when the system needs more than that maximum. It's not really a good thing to do. You would be better off going through your hard disk seeing what you can ditch. There will almost certainly be programs you no longer need that you can uninstall.
On a smaller scale there might be a stack of sound files stored as .wav files that can be compressed to .mp3 therby saving about 90% of the space they take up. You would need to check that you have the codecs to play them but converting one and trying it as an extra file will prove the point. DBPowerAmp Music Converter is great for this (you use a right click Context Menu) and it's free.
Similarly there may be .bmp pictures that can be compressed to .jpg although I suspect that you want to go for much bigger and easier fish to get any appreciable saving.
Derek.W
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I agree. Setting a max swapfile can lead to problems. With 1 GB of free drive space there is no need for a max setting anyway.
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