Feeling Spaced-Out? Here’s How to Cope
The hard drive on my 2-year-old PC is starting to feel like the garage and closets in my house. When I first moved in, there was plenty of room. Now I can’t seem to find any.
If you use a PC with Windows 95 or a Macintosh, you’re particularly vulnerable to running out of disk space. The operating systems take up an enormous amount of space, and it’s not uncommon for an application “suite,” like Microsoft Office or WordPerfect Office, to take up more than a 100 megabytes of storage. Graphics files, which are becoming increasingly popular, take up a lot more space than standard text files. Audio and video files are even bigger.
It’s no wonder that many people find themselves running out of space. Fortunately, there are several solutions, some of which are free.
The first thing you should do is see if there are any unnecessary files you can delete. Begin with temporary files. Many programs create files they are supposed to delete if everything goes according to plan. But that doesn’t always happen. For example, if Windows or Windows 95 crashes before you have a chance to shut down your machine or if you ever turn off your PC or Mac without going through the prescribed shutdown procedure, the operating system and some application programs will leave files on the disk that should have been automatically erased. Often these files end with the extension .tmp. Sometimes they’ll be in a directory called temp, but they can also be stored in other directories. You can use the Windows or Windows 95 search command to find any directories called temp or files ending in .tmp. Once you find the files, they’re easy to delete.
Windows 95 comes with two programs, Disk Defragmenter and ScanDisk, which can help free up disk space, even though that’s not the primary purpose of either program. Run these programs every week or so, and your hard disk will run faster and store information more efficiently.
My wife recently cleaned up our garage and found lots of space, and I just did the same thing with my hard drive. It’s a good idea to hunt for program and data files you don’t need.
Anyone who downloads shareware or public domain programs from the Internet or an online service is bound to have several unused software programs around. If you’re using Windows 95, try to use the “add/remove programs” option from the control panel. If the program you want to delete isn’t listed there, you can just delete the directory where the software is stored. Of course, it’s important not to accidentally delete needed files. Always be sure you have an up-to-date backup before deleting files.
Another option is to compress your hard disk. Windows 95 and MS DOS 6.22 come with software that can be used to effectively double the capacity of your hard disk by making files smaller. I know it sounds like magic, but there is a science to compression. I use Windows 95’s DriveSpace compression program on some of my machines and am happy with the results. For even better results, you can purchase the Microsoft Windows Plus CD-ROM, which comes with DriveSpace 3, a more robust compression program. Mac users can purchase Stacker from Stac Electronics for the hard disk or can use Stuffit Deluxe from Aladdin Systems to compress individual files.
Sometimes there’s no getting around the need for a larger hard disk drive. The good news is that high-capacity hard drives are now cheap and fairly easy to install. In addition to increasing your space, a second hard drive provides a very fast backup option. Every day I spend about 30 seconds copying all my new or updated data files from my C drive to my D drive. It won’t protect me in the event of a fire or theft of my PC, but I’m much more likely to recover from a disk crash or human error.
Most IBM-compatible PCs come with an IDE hard drive, and it’s possible to install a second IDE drive without having to buy another disk controller card. You can get a 1-gigabyte (1,000 megabytes) IDE drive for about $270.
Installation requires that you take apart your PC, connect the drive to your IDE cable and insert the drive itself into an extra drive bay on your machine. You’ll also have to run some software to configure your new hard drive. It’s a piece of cake for a technician and shouldn’t cost more than about $50 to have it done professionally.
Another option is to purchase an external drive, such as the Jaz drive from Iomega ([800]697-8833). If your computer doesn’t already have one, you’ll need to install a SCSI (small computer systems interface) card in your PC (under $100), but once that card has been installed, you can plug in up to seven devices, including hard drives, scanners and CD-ROM drives. Macs have built-in SCSI connectors, as do some PCs. Once the SCSI card is installed, you simply plug in the Jaz drive and you’re ready to go.
The external Jaz drive ($599) is the easiest to install and can be moved from one machine to another--even if one is a PC and the other a Mac. An internal version is available for $499.
Lawrence J. Magid can be reached by e-mail at magid@latimes.com. His World Wide Web page is at https://www.larrysworld.com
