Dear Sean Finnegan:

I don't want to alarm you, but you need to stop what you are doing with the
computer.  Windows 95 has a really nasty habit, when the hard drive space
gets low, of randomly overwriting files to gain new space for the swap
drive.

I don't know whether Windows goes after the oldest sectors or the newest
sectors, but it can be a disaster.  Each time you boot up the machine,
Windows re-initializes the swap drive.  It does not always stay in the same
place.

Usually the swap drive is the same size or a little larger than the amount
of ram you have.

I have a drive in my possession where Windows 95 slowly ate up my friend's
document files, which just happened to be the last files he "saved" with his
word processor.  All gone.

One way to regain space is to right click on Internet Explorer, select
Properties,
go down to the Temporary Internet Files section and select Delete Files.
When the window opens click on the box delete all offline content.  That
will wipe out all the files saved in your internet cache, which includes all
web pages accessed recently, all attachments received from outlook express,
etc.  This assumes you have at least IE version 5.0.  If you don't well I
don't know what to say.

If you use Netscape, go into netscape properties and erase the cache there.
Most likely, you have many megabytes of wasted space tied up in useless
cached files.

You can also improve performance slightly in IE by setting history to 0 and
erasing your recent history.

BUT DO NOT START RANDOMLY DELETING PROGRAMS WITH WINDOWS EXPLORER AND THE
DELETE KEY.  OTHERWISE YOU WILL INEVITABLY END UP FDISKING, FORMATTING AND
STARTING ALL OVER WITH NOTHING BUT YOUR BACKUPS TO CONSOLE YOU!!

The trick is, do not do too much activity whereby files will be written to
the disk.

In my experience, a hard drive will start doing this when free space is down
to a few hundred megabytes.  Windows tends to protect the operating system,
above all other applications.  I have seen machines with as few as 90
megabytes of free space, but they crashed constantly and no useful
processsing applications could be run.

Some background.  When you "open" a file, the operating system (OS) reads
the FAT from the hard drive, and writes a copy of it in memory.  Then it
loads as much of the file or program as it can into memory.  If you are
using a program such as word perfect, it will open a temporary file.  There
will actually be at least 3 files open, the original as read only, the
temporary, and the final version.  When you hit save, it writes the final,
flushes the temporary (in cache) and re-reads the original into a new
temporary cache.  Similar things occur with other application programs.
That was in DOS, Windows adds a complication fact, the GUI or graphical user
interface, the wonderful screen and desktop you see in Windows that is your
interface to the underlying DOS.

The point of the BORING lecture on DOS is "memory".  Memory is ram memory
and swap memory.  You might notice if you only have 64 MB of ram when you
open a large WP file of say 50 pages or so (or a Word doc of the same size)
or about 240 KB in size, the disk light flashes.  Because WP is writing
those file images to "memory" part to ram and the rest to swap memory.

As you might surmise, there is lots of disk activity going on.  As you also
might surmise, if you are short of disk space, windows is going to grab what
it can find and over write it.

Once you gain a little space, and assuming you have the original disks, you
will need to start uninstalling the "disk hog" programs such as Word, Word
Perfect, Photoshop, etc.  You know, the disk hogs that takes hundreds of
megabytes of disk space when you install them, and cause you to need to buy
a new Hard Drive every year or so.

Also if you are like me, and like to test out new programs, you can end up
with a Windows folder of several hundred megabytes filled with all kinds of
trash left over from uninstalling amateurishly written programs that do not
completely "uninstall" themselves.

So, be careful, and start selectively deleting, and hopefully you have some
disks to back up with?  And clear off some of the real estate on your hard
drive.  And Oh Yes, get at least a 13 Gb hard drive or two.

Robert B. Hemming
[log in to unmask]



----- Original Message -----
> Date:    Wed, 31 Jul 2002 22:44:24 +0100
> From:    John Finnegan <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: Making space on HD
>
> Hello
>
> The hard drive on my PC is running out of Space. I have Windows 95.
>
> Would like to know what items I can delete and the best procedure for
doing
> that.
>
> All help appreciated.
>
> Regards
>
>
> -----------------------------------
> Sean Finnegan
> Trinity College
> Dublin
> Email: [log in to unmask]
> -----------------------------------

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