Horus wrote: The reason that I am giving you this warning is that sometimes other applications may be using the same folders of pictures and giving the impression that there is more than one copy on your PC. Picassa is a good example of this as it only loads all your existing pictures and does not have any copies of its own. although it may look as if it has.

That is a very good warning Horus I use Picasa all the time and find it very good for managing albums. I seldom use the editing features except just to quickly try something. You DO have to be careful when deleting though because in most instances it just deletes from a Picasa album and not from the hard drive. However there are instances when it will delete the original and although a warning comes up, it is not too explicit and can be misread.

And there speaks the voice of experience...

Kiya just as long as you know for sure that you have 2 copies of the same picture on your PC then you should delete one of the copies as it is just taking up space. Before you do delete anything, just make sure that you have it backed up on your 1 TB drive, once you are sure you have a backup copy then delete one of the duplicates on your PC. After you have done so, check to see that the other copy is still there on the PC, if it is then all is OK and you can continue deleting any other duplicates on your PC, but if for some reason both copies are deleted then you can restore a copy off your external drive.

The reason that I am giving you this warning is that sometimes other applications may be using the same folders of pictures and giving the impression that there is more than one copy on your PC. Picassa is a good example of this as it only loads all your existing pictures and does not have any copies of its own. although it may look as if it has.

Grandad I empty the temp files every second day or so, I've no idea what the running "registry" is but I do remember on the green forum we spoke of this & you saying you really should know what your doing with this ......fraid I don't!
I do run my anti virus quite regulary, evrything is ok there.

Sorry I have'nt got back sooner, I've had so much problems with my neck,shoulders,arms & hands since Oct last I thought doing next to nothing/rest over the weekend may help but it hasn't.
I wish there was a doc on this forum to tell/advise what could be causing all the pain, simple things as dressing/undressing,brushing my hair etc etc anything where I have to raise my arms is agony, I've been taking paracetamol & Ibuprofen but it dosen't help much at all.
Anyways back to the topic
Horus when I upload any pictures I do it in PSElements 7 & do any editing from here then I tag the photos I keep into named albums, at the same time there is a back up copy of all photos in "My Pictures" on computer with any edited photos also & the copy on my external hard drive so 3 copies in all, I've never thought of it before of the backup copy in "My Pictures" taken up double the space, perhaps I should delete these ??

Grandad wrote: I have just a 250mb backup but only use it each Monday on my regular maintenance routine that only takes a few minutes.

That should of course read '250gb not mb'.....too near my bedtime

Forgot to mention I also run Malwarebytes to clean up any junk that may have got through my virus protection and firewall that I have as part of my phone and broadband deal. Never find anything though

Kiya, I do a weekly clean of temp files and registry.

I do it every Monday but have just done both clean ups to see what has accumulated in 4 days. The temp files only accounted for 3.3mb but the registry was 100mb.

If you don't do a registry clean regularly you may be surprised how much space you free up. I use Max Registry Cleaner on a small annual subscription but you may find a freebie to do this.

BTW...I don't like the sound of you using your 'backup' as a regular hard drive. What if that crashes??? I have just a 250mb backup but only use it each Monday on my regular maintenance routine that only takes a few minutes.

Kiya, if you are still storing your pictures on the 1 TB disc then 30 plus GB is quite a bit of space to store most of what you are probably doing. However if you are still storing another copy on your hard drive then you will just be denying yourself hard disc space on your laptop. It is always good to have a backup copy such as your 1 TB drive, but if you are saving double copies (just in case) then you would be best to just copy a load onto a couple of DVD discs, that alone would free up about 9 GB's of space. If you did that for all your pictures you could then delete all the copies from your laptop and have loads of free space.

Thanks Ruby Slippers & Horus, wow! RS thats a mighty big file

I did the Disk Cleanup & Defrag but it didn't free that much

H... I was doing just that this morning.....gettting rid of unwanted photos/copies etc.

If you remember I did buy a terabyte gb external hard drive last year, it is easy enough moving photos to that but I find when I'm working in PSshop its a nuisance when I want to find anything from the external hard drive.

Oh well can't win em all

You have to remember Kiya that the Operating System will take up a lot of space as will all the programs you have installed. The remaining free space is just that, free space, so you can file it up with data, which may be documents or picture files. Picture files take up lots of space, so get rid of any duplicates or ones you do not want to keep. Doing a disk cleanup or a 'Defrag' of your hard drive usually results in more space being freed up. The other answer is to buy cheap removable hard drive and put all your pictures on that.

Kiya, you could start with a 'Disc Cleanup'! I recently deleted a single file which had 70 Gb (YES! 70 Gb!) of photos in it and thought that was it but it still took a disc cleanup to give me back much needed space!

Just been checking the properties on my computer & trying to free some space, I usually like it half & half at the moment it is
Used space: 43.7GB
Free space: 30.7GB
The free space is the lowest I have seen it, what do I do to free space ?