Compress C Drive

After clearing programs and files I don't need and moving music and photos to an external drive, my C drive is still in the red. (39g of 451g available) Is it safe to compress the c drive and if so do I compress the subfolders and files too?

Machine is a dell inspiron laptop. Just increased the RAM from 4 to 8g. Running on windows 7.

Any and all suggestions greatly appreciated.

 

Compressing works, but it puts the data at greater risk of corruption. I don't recommend it. Note too, because the files have to be decompressed to be used, then compressed again when closed or saved back, performance can take a significant hit.

You note you are still using over 400GB of disk space on that drive. That is a HUGE amount and I doubt very much if even half of that is made up of "program" files. I suspect you still have many large "user" or "data" files left on that drive. These may include large video or music files, or even more high-resolution image/photo files that can be moved to another drive. There could even be some corrupted files taking up a lot of space. You could easily have a couple versions of Windows and a couple versions of the entire Microsoft Office suite installed and barely break 100GB.

I think you need to examine your HD and see where all that space is going.

You might try something like Folder Size, TreeSize and/or my favorite, WinDirStat to map out your drive(s) and see where the space is being used. But I caution, do not delete anything unless sure it is not needed by your system - Google it first.

If you recently upgraded from W7/W8 to W10, or just completed a major W10 upgrade, you might have a windows.old folder on your disk taking up big chunk of data too. These folders are automatically deleted after 30 days. But IF you are sure your system is working fine otherwise and you will not want to roll back to a previous version, you can safely delete that folder earlier.

 

Treesize is my favorite; but, I have been using it since the early 1990's. I don't think you've "moved" what you think you have; copying makes two copies and leaves the original files where they were.
I, BTW, am also running 7, have none of my data files on "C", and have only used 60GB.

 

Thanks, I'll try that tomorrow. Does seem odd that there is so little space on a machine with so little on it!

 

So little on it? Ummm, have you scanned for malware just to be sure your system is clean? You also might run Windows Disk Cleanup to rid the system of clutter.

See this: http://www.howtogeek.com/125923/7-ways-to-free-up-hard-disk-space-on-windows/ (it also talking about WinDirStat).

Note you should not have to do anything with System Restore. When working properly, it will automatically downsize, to the point of disabling itself, if free space is needed.