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|| SportsShooter.com: Member Message Board
Freeing up drive space on a laptop
Michael Myers, Photographer, Student/Intern
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Miami Beach | FL | USA | Posted: 1:06 AM on 03.23.07 |
->> In trying to free up space on my laptop, I found 200 megs or so in Adobe Bridge, which apparently is a part of Photoshop CS2. In looking at the website on Bridge, I can't see any reason why I need this program. Anyone here know if it's essential to using Photoshop, or can it be deleted?
I was trying to free up 15% free space so I could do a "defrag". Then I found this huge file on my C drive, The hiberfil.sys - it turns out that this file will be as large as the amount of RAM you've got (512 megs or maybe a gig!), and it's used to allow your computer to hibernate. It's all explained here: http://www.softwarepatch.com/tips/hiberfil-sys-xp.html
I deleted that file by following the instructions at the bottom of the page, which got me up to 16% free space so I could do the defrag. I'll maybe put it back again later, but if you've got a laptop and need more space, this is one quick way to get it. |
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Joel Kowsky, Student/Intern, Photographer
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Columbia | MO | United States | Posted: 1:25 AM on 03.23.07 |
| ->> Bridge is the file browser for Photoshop. If you use another program like Photo Mechanic or some other file browser I guess it wouldn't be essential... 200MB isn't that much though... |
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Peter Grigsby, Student/Intern
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Arcata | CA | USA | Posted: 1:30 AM on 03.23.07 |
| ->> If you don’t use Bridge then what program do you use to manage your images when using Photoshop? I’m pretty sure that Photoshop will still work perfectly if you do delete Bridge, however, I don’t really understand why you would want to. |
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David Templeton, Photographer, Assistant
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Hammonton | NJ | USA | Posted: 2:27 AM on 03.23.07 |
->> Deleting a couple hundred megs here and there won't clear up enough space for you...
I've played this game many times! Unfortunately, even after you free up some space, you'll only be back to having no space left in a month or two.
Usually the best way to clear up space is to move huge amounts of data off the drive... say if you store lots of photos on your laptop, to move them to a desktop or portable hard drive. When I decided to move my photos onto a portable hard drive, I freed up 40GB!
If you don't have any stuff to move off, the only solution to give you long-lasting free space is to get a bigger hard drive. You can get a 120GB 2.5" notebook hard drive off Newegg.com for $80 these days. You'll have to spend a day reinstalling your stuff, but it will be worth it if you think you have a couple years of use still left in your notebook.
Speaking as someone with four 320GB drives in his desktop, and almost out of space... |
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Chuck Steenburgh, Photographer
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Lexington | VA | USA | Posted: 7:10 AM on 03.23.07 |
->> Yep, you really need a system of off-laptop storage. My laptop has a 120GB drive, which is enough for about the last month or so worth of shooting.
I have a system where after I return home from a shoot, I immediately back those photos up to my primary desktop via my home network. The photos from the desktop are then backed up to a second home-built desktop (turned out to be a lot cheaper than one of those high-falutin' 'NAS' enclosures) with drives configured in RAID mirrors. When the laptop starts to get full, I delete a month's worth of images (by then almost two months old). There are already two, redundant copies on my other computers.
My two desktops mount a total of 14 hard drives (7 internal, 7 external), ranging in size from 160-400 GB. I basically wait for rebates, specials, etc. You can get large hard drives @ 4GB to the dollar (internal) or 3GB to the dollar (external) if you watch the sales.
I have a mishmash of gear, no doubt - 7 different enclosures, some USB, some Firewire, some IDE, some SATA - but it all works without a problem and I have lots of space and lots of safeguards. And it's a lot cheaper than investing in one of those fancy-schmancy network storage devices. And almost infintely expandable. (Actually, I'm pretty close to maxing out my drives with the system I have...I need a new motherboard for my home-built that will support more internal drives.) |
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Michael Myers, Photographer, Student/Intern
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Miami Beach | FL | USA | Posted: 2:07 PM on 03.23.07 |
->> I've got a Sony PCG-TR3AP laptop, which has a 30 gig drive. It's box-stock, no add-ons (yet). Drive C is 13.9 gigs, and while I had lots of free space for normal use, doing a defrag means the operating system wants 15% free space. I had 12%, so the 200 megs I might have freed up would have been useful - but I got 500 megs back by doing away with the above mentioned file, bringing me up to 16% free space.
No, I can't delete photos from that drive, as all my "work" type stuff goes on drive D. Yes, a larger hard drive would be nice, but I'm not yet at the point where I need to do all that, and probably won't until I replace this computer with something that's physically no bigger, but is faster and has larger hard drives... and more importantly, more memory. I'm also looking at the "flybook" laptops, which are even smaller than my Sony. I wish they were more reasonably priced, but they're awesome - and tiny!!!
Until now, I had no idea what Adobe Bridge was, or what it does, or for that matter whether or not I needed it. I guess it's an important function, so I'll keep it.
David, while in your case deleting a couple of hundred megs might not have worked, I didn't need all that much more, to be able to do my defrag. I don't store data on drive C, at least not for long - it all goes into drive D. I probably should move my Outlook 'pst' file to drive D as well. As I see it, drive C is the "system drive" and I try not to use it for other purposes too much. Since I hadn't done a defrag in years, I really did want to do it now though, before leaving on yet another trip to Asia. If I had the time, I'd probably do as you suggest, buy a huge hard drive for not that much money, and try to use something like Norton Ghost to copy over *everything*. I suppose the easiest way to do that would be to use a USB hard drive, make images of my existing drives and copy them to the USB device, then replace the drive with a larger one, and then find a way to recover the "disk images". I'm guessing that I'd be working at this for a week or so.... but right now I'm not even sure how to take the hard drive out of my laptop! |
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