[Solved] Deleting Downloads

This may be a foolish question, but is it always wise to delete everything in your download folder, they are just the root copy of what you have already installed correct?

 

Yes I am concerned about that too ..but I have only 2 Gigs of RAM ..so I am transferring important one's to a flash drive instead of completely deleting them.

 

Sorry I meant disk space! Thanks again Cindy-E!

 

Hi John,

2gb of available drive space is rather small - is this on a separate partition from your operating system? If that is the case, although small, it is workable but if it shares the same partition as your operating system then you are likely to suffer slowdowns and possible temporary locking up of the system.

It's probably a good idea to aim for a minimum of 20 - 25% free space on your system partition - any less than that then perhaps one should consider a clean out of any unnecessary clutter including programs that are not used, old log files, data files no longer required and even all but the latest restore point (restore points can hog a great deal of space).

Another consideration with regard to saving space is to make use of portable programs to replace some of your installed programs. For example there are very good examples of portable office suites and photo editing software available that can be installed on and run from a flash drive - most program types can be found as portables (i.e. they do not require registry entries so can be run from external devices) and most are free.

 

Yeah 2 Gb free space will never fly as there is barely enough room for a swap file there and very soon that pc will slow to a crawl. Hard drives are so inexpensive these days, why not add another drive and then reinstall programs to that drive and move over storage.

 

Yes, a bigger hard drive is the answer but if you consider your system too old for an internal change to be economically viable, consider an external USB drive (the latest USB3 drives are backwards compatible to earlier USB standards but without the increased performance). You could then move all your data to the external drive and add any portable application equivalents of programs installed on the internal drive allowing you to uninstall installed versions to gain more space. Should your computer fail completely at some stage, you will still have the external drive to use with a replacement.