No matter how many hard drives you have in your computer, each program you install will take up residence on your C: drive. The operating system and applications by default treat the C: drive as their natural home. This is a fine arrangement until your C: drive starts to run out of space. When that happens, life becomes difficult. Your system’s performance may suffer, you’ll start getting error messages when disk space becomes critical and you’ll have nowhere to install any new programs. Here we offer some tips for solutions, including moving programs to another drive.
From the human perspective, if you have a couple of drives available it often makes sense to treat C: as the system drive; it then becomes a playground for Windows, all your applications and maybe some random files littered on your desktop, while D: becomes your data store, housing all your documents, music, videos and other files. This method makes backing up your data particularly easy.
However, if you find your C: drive running out of space, you can alleviate this problem a little by cleaning out your drive. To do so, click Start —> Computer, right-click the C: drive and select Properties —> General tab —> ‘Disk Cleanup’. In addition, you may want to clean out programs you no longer use, including any fluff installed when you first got your computer. For that, click Start, type <code> program </code>, click ‘Programs and Features’, scroll through the list, click any program you don’t want and then click Uninstall.
When you’ve been through this process several times and your C: drive is still chockers, you have two alternatives: buy a bigger hard drive and go through the process of transferring everything to it or start forcing programs to live elsewhere on your system.
Installing to another drive
When you install a program, it may or may not offer you the chance to select the installation drive. It’s up to the program developer to decide whether you’ll have this option, so while in some cases you’ll be stuck with a C: drive installation, in others you’ll have a choice. Unless you’re on the lookout for such an option, it’s easy to miss and then the program will end up on C: by default, chewing up more of your precious disk space. The way to avoid this differs from program to program.
- Look for an option during the installation routine that lets you choose where the program will be installed. In many programs, this option is clearly displayed — just look for it, click the Browse button and then select a location on a drive other than C:. You may wish to set up a Programs folder on the destination drive beforehand and then install your programs within that folder.
- Some programs only let you choose the installation folder if you first select an advanced installation routine. If the program offers you the choice of a standard, complete or custom installation, choose the custom installation. If the program invites you to tick a box to display advanced options instead, tick it. The wording may change from program to program, so you need to be on the lookout for the installation option that gives you most control: custom, advanced or whatever. If you skip this step, the installation will proceed without giving you the chance to choose the location.
- Some installation programs display an ‘Install to’ or ‘Destination folder’ message with the default C: drive location listed. In this case, click the Change button beside the location to choose another destination.
Moving existing programs
If you’re really strapped for space on your C: drive, you may want to move some of your existing programs. To do that, you’ll first need to uninstall the program (‘Control Panel’ —> ‘Programs and Features’) and then reinstall it, choosing a new location. Once again, this will only work if the program gives you the option to choose the installation folder; sometimes discovering that is a matter of trial and error. One large application that gives you this option is Microsoft Office — just click the Customize button during the installation routine.
Add another!
One of the drawbacks of putting some of your programs on a drive you normally reserve for data is that it makes backing up more complex. Given the price of hard disk drives, a solution is to add yet another drive for ‘overflow’ program storage. This third drive doesn’t need to be massive and provided your computer system has room and power for the drive, it’s a simple solution — certainly far less of a hassle than replacing your existing system drive.
don't have a problem yet, as my acer aspire 5755g has a 750gig
hdd,as C drive only, of which approx 680 is useable. Norton 360 occasionally tells me i've too many programs (any over 100), so far i've solved the problem by ditching a few frivilous ones. the one gripe i had about this new computer, was the amount of rubbish Acer put in it a lot of trial and pay later programs, stupid games etc. can anyone tell me how to get rid of some Windows rubbish? have tried only to be told i must be a windows "trusted installer", is there any way of circumventing this without crashing computer??
regarding your advice on xtra storage, have two 1tb hdds and two
2tb hdd's, plus an 8gig usb stick as a virtual ram to back up the 8 gig installed.(bought and installed xtra 4 gig) so am not short of storage.as a result, most programs go like the clappers. have most esential programs copied into one of the 2tb ones, as i learnt a lesson the hard way after "killing" my old computer,
once again thanks for all your good advice,
John Middleton