The mysterious case of the full C drive.
Mrs S has a laptop with a 250GB hard drive
with 115GB of data on it, and the computer was telling her the hard drive was full! As a result her laptop was somewhat sluggish (not surprisingly as the C drive of any computer needs at least 25% of free space to work at it's best).
So what happened to the other half of the drive?
Don't ask why but traditionally laptop computers have had their hard drive "partitioned" into two halves. Partitioned is a way of setting up a hard drive to appear as two (or more) virtual drives which work just as if there were the same number of physical drives present in a computer. In Mrs S' case there were two drives present when "My Computer" is opened, "Local Drive C" and "Local Drive D". As might be expected "C" was full while "D" was virtually empty.
The theory behind setting a laptop's hard drive as two virtual drives, is that things like Windows and other programs are installed on "C" while the things you save (documents, photos, music and the like) are saved on "D". This makes re-installing Windows (if you ever have to do it) easier as you don't have to save all your data first - the computer "thinks" it's on a different drive!
Unfortunately no one ever reads the instruction manual (which is on the computer's hard drive!) and so nobody ever knows to save it as the manufacturer intended.
One quick shuffling around of things later and Mrs S had her laptop back up to full speed.
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