music taking up too much hard disk space

hi Peeps,
i have a Toshiba satellite A30-203 lap top with 30 GB hard disk space. being a music buff finds me having used up about 12GB of my hard disk on Music, 12 GB on other stuff and 8 GB free space remaining. this has resulted in my system having slow down tremendously, especially during power up. i have ran defragmentors, cleaners etc which have helped a little.
what can i do to store these music files on less space and still have easy access to them when i wanna listen to them or add new stuff?
please help.Thanks
Wongie

 

Are they MP3 files, or WAV files? Also, what size MP3? 128kbps? More? Less?

 

Actually, I see no reason why having MP3 files would make your system slow. Perhaps Windows is relying too much on Virtual Memory because your laptop needs more RAM. How much RAM do you have now?
Plus, 8GB is a fair amount of space to have left.

 

they are all MP3 files and are 192kbps and more.

As far as my RAM is concerned, i have no idea how much i have or even how i check that. how to i do that? i know that i'm originally supposed to have had 256 MB DDR RAM but what that at now, have no idea

 

Right click on 'My Computer', and choose Properties.
That will tell you how much RAM you have. If it IS 256, I suggest getting more.
512 should be adequate, the more the better however.

 

Doesn't matter what sort of file it is, if you fill your drive up with any kind of file you will experience a performance hit.

8GB should be fine for Windows to move about in though

I would reccomend doing a bit of a clean out, organise your files, use Anti Spyware tools, and a Registry cleanup never goes amiss

 

yes all of the suggestions listed are good and another one that you might like to try is getting itunes, dispite the fact not owning an ipod (well maybe you do i don't know), and converting your music to .aac format which takes up less space without losing quality.

but as everyone says, 8gb is plenty of space to play around with