atari2600land's Blog

Why not just add another drive to it?

Well, I turned it off and turned it back on again and magically it says I have 285 GB left where as at the time I posted the blog it said I had <10 GB left. So WTF happened?

OK, this is weird. I somehow lost 30 GB of storage keeping it on.

10 GB? My computer still doesn't have that much storage space today.

Download the Kaspersky rescue disk http://rescuedisk.kaspersky-labs.com/rescuedisk/updatable/kav_rescue_10.iso and burn it to CD. Boot the CD and do a scan. See http://support.kaspersky.com/viruses/rescuedisk for full instructions.

Maybe it's the trashcan that turns full. You see, if you delete a file, it goes into the trashcan first, where you can restore it from. But while it's there it still occupies memory. Only when you empty the trashcan, the memory gets freed.

 

Then there's some sort of automatic cleanup which engages if memory becomes low. This happened to me multiple times on my old PC, and it freed up some serious memory.

 

Then there's the possibility of backing up data, and of expanding. In the 80's, usually home computers didn't have a hard drive at all, so everything had to be kept on tapes or disks which were external to the computer. And you could buy as many as you needed as they filled up. Then the first small harddisks came, but they were expensive, so I regarded them as a means of speeding up operation by keeping the OS and your most-needed programs and projects on. On my first PC, the harddisk only had 20 MB of storage, so I only had the OS and the core software on it, but all projects were still stored on floppy disks. With bigger harddisks, I moved some of the projects I was currently working on and which needed to be on a harddisk (such as Access databases) onto the harddisk as well, but all finished projects were still compressed and stored on floppies.

 

Then my previous PC initially had a 40 GB harddisk, but I managed to fill it up in about 6 months, at which point I started backing up the data on CD's and subsequently deleting everything finished from the harddisk, freeing up some space. Then some more months later I added another internal 120 GB harddisk to the system. The CD writer was later upgraded to a DVD drive, allowing me to store even bigger amounts of data on one disk. Then finally, after 6 years, I did buy the PC I'm using now... not because of storage shortage, but because the old PC was too slow for some modern software, and I needed to upgrade the OS because more and more programs didn't run on Windows ME. My current PC has two 360 GB drives built in, but I continued to backup my data on DVD's for security reasons, and eventually I switched to a 1 TB external harddrive for backup. Still I haven't deleted much from the internal harddrives, but I'm now at the level where my second internal harddrive (which is mainly used for storage, not for current projects) only has about 4 GB left, so I will have to delete some stuff from it which is backed up on the external harddrive anyway. But that doesn't hurt, and I'll definitely not buy a new PC because of that.

 

If your PC has other problems such as some programs not executing properly anymore, you may consider running a utility such as HijackThis or, in extreme cases, re-installing your PC. I had to do this about every other year because the system somehow became corrupted. This involves first backing up your data (if you don't know where to, I'd recommend buying an external harddrive for this purpose) and then re-installing the OS (probably Windows) and all the programs which you still need currently.

 

I like to think of the PC as a set of storage which is organized in different layers, where the smallest inner layer is used most frequently, but also the easiest to access and the outer layers get subsequently bigger and harder to access, but are also used less frequently. In real life the most inner layer would be your hands, but since you can only hold so many things with your hands, you'll need to put the things you don't currently need somewhere else, like on the table before you. But the table probably also won't be able to hold everything you need regularly, so you'll put some things you don't need that often away into some cupboard or other furniture, or even farther away in a storage room.

 

It's the same with a PC for me. It has the CPU where all the data flows through, then the RAM, then the internal harddisk. When that fills up, less frequently used data gets stored onto the external harddisk or other media.

 

A good analogy to this would actually be the Odyssey^2 system, where even the CPU contains multiple of such layers... there's the accumulator a where nearly everything flows through, then the index registers r0 and r1 which get used for nearly every memory access, then the registers r2 through r7 which probably hold some temporary variables with, let's say, a subroutine scope. Then there's internal memory and external memory. Each of those layers, in sequence, is somewhat harder to access, but also somewhat bigger and typically gets used if the inner layers fill up with data. The Odyssey^3 has yet another layer in the video memory which is even bigger (at least 2K), but also the most difficult one to access.

 

So... if your PC fills up, I guess it's time to put some data to an outer layer, even if it has yet to be created, or to delete some of the data you don't need anymore.