Help with “C drive full” issue, please

[Biggles50]

250 Gb is very small by todays performance laptop standards and whilst you have not answered a question on the amount of RAM installed the size of the SSD indicates that is will have the minimal amount.

Think 2Gb RAM for each CPU core as being the minimum required, double that for Photo Editing.

As suggested a Macbook is by far the best Laptop for Photo and Video editing.  We have a Macbook Air and it is blistering fast when I am using Photoshop, or video editing using FCP Pro or Da Vinci Resolve.  Ours is by no means top of range and it is far cheaper than an Asus Windows 11 Laptop with the same performance.

[Spelk]

I did a search online about using a usb flash drive as RAM and it seems I was right. Windows 8 and 10  can do this. Best you look up the instructions yourself.
As the memory stick will be left in your laptop permanently you should buy a physically small device so it does not stick out too much.
As your hard drive is SSD rather than a mechanical drive it may not give a big speed increase but it could up your effective RAM to say 32 Gb.
You could try it out with whatever USB drive you currently have though older USB drives will be slower.

[Davedrave]

250 Gb is very small by todays performance laptop standards and whilst you have not answered a question on the amount of RAM installed the size of the SSD indicates that is will have the minimal amount.

Think 2Gb RAM for each CPU core as being the minimum required, double that for Photo Editing.

As suggested a Macbook is by far the best Laptop for Photo and Video editing.  We have a Macbook Air and it is blistering fast when I am using Photoshop, or video editing using FCP Pro or Da Vinci Resolve.  Ours is by no means top of range and it is far cheaper than an Asus Windows 11 Laptop with the same performance.

Thank you. I’ve managed to find my laptop’s RAM at last, and it is 8GB. OS (C) has 8.8 GB free of 103 GB (showing a red bar. Does this mean that I was mistaken, and that my SSD is even smaller than 250 GB?). DATA (D) has 356 GB free of 931 GB (showing a blue bar).  I don’t do video, and for photos I use DxO PhotoLab for raw conversion, and it has worked fine until recently and even now it seems to work most of the time without a problem. I use Affinity Photo and/or an oldish version of Photoshop Elements for other tasks.

The minimum system requirements for my version of PhotoLab are 8GB RAM and 4 GB of available disk space. This is the same minimum as for my NIK Collection, though this does recommend 16 GH RAM and 6 GB disk space. IIRC, I may have run into a problem when using the HDR program in NIK, but I can’t be certain of that. I don’t mind the software being a bit slow, since I’m not using it other than as a hobbyist. I’ll look into the USB flash ploy as a possible short-term answer.

Dave

[Biggles50]

Use Windows Explorer to view the Laptop.

Open the My Computer and highlight the C drive, right click on it and select Properties.

You then see the details of the C drive.

What I would expect is that there is a hidden partition inside which is the Operating System restore files.

As for RAM if you ring Dell with your model and serial number they can quote you the RAM upgrade cost and talk you through how to do it if you are unsure.

[Spelk]

Dave you said earlier that you had emptied the trash bin. Was that an immediate deletion? Sometimes the S/W will not really delete it until after 30 days.
I've just been deleting the BBC iPlayer App from my computer and when I looked at the associated folders in the trash bin saw that the downloads folder contained 68Gb of old downloads. What's really annoying is that the vast majority of this was stuff which I could not access. I had assumed (foolishly) that anyone designing a bit of program to every day download the local news but not let you see the items from previous days would not have just left the old data sitting on my computer just gradually eating up more and more space.
Having deleted the offending stuff from my trash bin (permanently) I now have 180GB rather than 112GB available on my hard drive.

[Davedrave]

Use Windows Explorer to view the Laptop.

Open the My Computer and highlight the C drive, right click on it and select Properties.

You then see the details of the C drive.

What I would expect is that there is a hidden partition inside which is the Operating System restore files.

As for RAM if you ring Dell with your model and serial number they can quote you the RAM upgrade cost and talk you through how to do it if you are unsure.

Thanks for this information. I have looked into it and now realise that "C" drive is actually only 128 GB, but I also found that I had some files hiding on "C" that should have been on "D", and so have moved them and freed up more space.

I suspect that when I've run into problems with the photo software it has possibly been when I've had several photo programs open at once.

I'll look into the possibility of upgrading the RAM as you suggest.

Dave

[Davedrave]

Dave you said earlier that you had emptied the trash bin. Was that an immediate deletion? Sometimes the S/W will not really delete it until after 30 days.
I've just been deleting the BBC iPlayer App from my computer and when I looked at the associated folders in the trash bin saw that the downloads folder contained 68Gb of old downloads. What's really annoying is that the vast majority of this was stuff which I could not access. I had assumed (foolishly) that anyone designing a bit of program to every day download the local news but not let you see the items from previous days would not have just left the old data sitting on my computer just gradually eating up more and more space.
Having deleted the offending stuff from my trash bin (permanently) I now have 180GB rather than 112GB available on my hard drive.

Thanks, that's interesting. I did actually delete the contents of the recycle bin. I don't really use my laptop for much other than photographic work and word processing, and always use my iPad for watching iPlayer and most internet searching etc.

Dave

[Biggles50]

You could also look into upgrading your 1 Tb hard drive to an SSD that would also improve speeds.

£68 for a 2.5 SSD from Scan Computers which should be a direct replacement for the hard drive, but it may need a fixing bracket as well

[Davedrave]

You could also look into upgrading your 1 Tb hard drive to an SSD that would also improve speeds.

£68 for a 2.5 SSD from Scan Computers which should be a direct replacement for the hard drive, but it may need a fixing bracket as well

Thank you. The price seems very reasonable, but I'm just wondering how safe it would be for me to attempt a DIY replacement, or whether I might be better to go to a home computer technician. How idiot-proof would replacement be, I wonder?

Dave