When trying to copy a film from an external hard drive to my (empty) desktop i get presented with the message 'There is not enough space on Desktop. You need an additional XXX MB to copy these files.'

Anybody know why this may be or how to fix it? There clearly is enough space, i always keep my desktop empty?

There clearly is enough space, i always keep my desktop empty?

are you aware that the desktop is really just a folder which lives on your hard disk? 🙂

How much room do you have left on your HD ?

Putting files on your desktop is using partition C.

OS (C:) 450MB free of 58.5 GB

Local Disk (D:) 393 GB free of 397 GB

Thanks for the sarcasm retro 83. By my own emmission im not the sharpest tool! Hence the plee for help! But i was aware 'desktop' is a file.

There you go, "desktop" will be in C:, so there's not enough room at a guess with only 450-mb free

Ahh, thanks woody. Why have i got so much room in Local Disk (D:)?

OS (C:) 450MB free of 58.5 GB

this is bad, if the drive is so full it's likely to be heavily fragmented and hence much slower than it could be. Move some stuff onto the other, empty drive ASAP!

By my own emmission

you can keep those to yourself thanks 🙂

Why have i got so much room in Local Disk (D:)?

because you've not put anything there. The OS doesn't do anything with other drives unless you tell it to.

Where do you save everything? Is it in My Music/Documents/Pictures? If so they are probably located on your C drive and it would be an idea to move them to D before Windows grinds to a halt.

OS (C:) 450MB free of 58.5 GB

I dare say you have performance issues too – you need to free up some space

Pretty much all data, applications etc are installed on C: by default.

Plus storing your own personal data on D: will be slightly safer, just in case you need to re-install OS on C:.

Thanks all. Can I set up so My Documents/Music/pics etc all automatically got to D? Is it literally a case of just moving them?

As Ourkidsam says, if you're saving things on a day-to-day basis to 'My Documents' folder (or any of its sub-folders) then you need to move the location of this to your D drive.

Here's how to do it in Windows XP, not sure how you go about it in Vista or Windows 7

Thanks for the sarcasm retro 83. By my own emmission im not the sharpest tool! Hence the plee for help! But i was aware 'desktop' is a file.

I wasn't being sarcastic, I just thought the poorly worded error message and your perfectly reasonable response to it was amusing. 🙂

If you right click "my documents", you should find a yourself looking at a tab saying target, under the location of the target in an option to "move" the target, do this.. it's a start in the right direction.

as above

I'd also suggest you run MS Disc Cleanup as it seems you need as much space as possible, with only 450MB free!

Even running disc cleanup doesn't always get all the temporary files, so follow this (it won't let you delete anything that being used, so go ahead)
http://pcsupport.about.com/od/maintenance/ht/manualtempxp.htm
It's also worth cleaning out your local profiles temp files too, these are located (in XP) "C:\Documents and settings\%your username%\local settings\temp"
Surprising how much crap Windoze likes to hoard.

Oh and stop storing stuff on your desktop, pop it into a folder on D and create a shortcut to that folder on your desktop.

Thanks Everyone. Good lot for me to be cracking on with.

And Z1ppy, thanks for the links and advice. And usually i dont stre stufff on my desktop. Only current things, one or two documents and a film im about to watch etc. Usually its empty.

Cheers!

If you right click "my documents", you should find a yourself looking at a tab saying target, under the location of the target in an option to "move" the target, do this.. it's a start in the right direction.

using what OS? When I tried it on XP I got a drop down menu "Open, Explore, Search…" with no mention of a target. Also I believe Microsoft recommend that you don't move "My Documents"

Microsoft have a good write-up of how to move 'my documents' and 'shared documents' on their website so they must be fairly OK with it. There is a power toy to do it, too.

When I tried it on XP I got a drop down menu "Open, Explore, Search.

Further down that list is 'Properties'
that gets you where you want to be

sing what OS? When I tried it on XP I got a drop down menu "Open, Explore, Search…" with no mention of a target. Also I believe Microsoft recommend that you don't move "My Documents"

Yes on XP, but you need to click on 'Properties' for 'Target'.

that gets you where you want to be

not me! My Documents is a can of worms. When I upgraded to Windows 7 I plugged in my old drive to copy my data and kept getting endless "Access denied" messages, even though I'm an administrator, and even now I come across "My Documents", "My Music" etc when searching on my boot drive which are Access Denied because I think they're not real folders, just place markers for whatever reason. An example of "helpful" virtualisation which actually makes things more complicated 🙁

This cropped up in another thread yesterday, but it's common for manufacturers to create two partitions on a disk, C: and D:, for 'system' and 'data' respectively. The idea is that you save all your files onto D: so that if Windows dies a death it's (relatively) painless to flatten the C: drive and rebuild it without losing any data. It's possible that they've even included some home-grown recovery routine which does exactly that.

The problem you've got, presumably, is you've not been using the D: drive to store data. This again is pretty common. Moving your My Documents folder is a good start, along with any folders you've created yourself to store data.

Whilst Z1ppy's otherwise correct, I'd be leary of deleting things manually as he suggests unless you're confident that you know what you're doing. You can get utilities which do a better job, TFC comes Cougar-approved.

What version of Windows are you running? XP / Vista / 7?

kept getting endless "Access denied" messages, even though I'm an administrator,

That's because you're an admin on your new PC but not your old one – NTFS will remember the old permissions, which don't exist on your new PC. You should be able to take ownership of them though.

That's because you're an admin on your new PC but not your old one

well, obviously I was, but that entire machine was scrapped 🙂 And yes after a lot of clicking I got acccess!

Definitely run the disk cleanup. Windows updates chew up a lot of space, this deletes them.

No it doesn't.

hense why I say to manually delete enything in the temp directories (it's Fine!), I do this as a job (or used to 😕 )

But yeah there no doubt tools to do it for you…

CCleaner linky will do the hard work of cleaning up temp files/junk for you in a painless manner.

install CCleaner instead of using the built in Windows one

Then run defragment yourr c: drive.

Then run defragment yourr c: drive.

bear in mind Windows defrag is shite 🙁

Especially in Vista (not tried it in 7), as you don't even get the pretty visualisations to watch anymore, BOOOO!

Been using this one and it seems to work well – not that I'm an expert on defragmentation tools.

To the OP, just copy your MP3, porn video collection and photos over to the D drive, you'll free up loads of space very quickly. Then start playing with the other options above.

bear in mind Windows defrag is shite

I run it occasionally, letting it do it's thing before carrying on oblivious to any improvement it's made.

Which may explain why I've never really noticed a significant difference.

Any decent 3rd party ones you can recommend?

TFC is better (and safer) than CCleaner.

hense why I say to manually delete enything in the temp directories (it's Fine!), I do this as a job (or used to )

I still do (-: I'm leary of giving out 'delete everything in this directory' advice when I can't see what's going on because, with the greatest of respect to the OP, for all I know he could be a gibbon. This is why I recommend TFC – it's safer and considerably more thorough.

bear in mind Windows defrag is shite

Bear in mind that Windows defrag used to be shite. Ten years ago I'd have agreed wholeheartedly.

Any decent 3rd party ones you can recommend?

Most of them will perform a defrag using the Microsoft API, so all you're getting is Windows Defrag and a pretty interface. Anything they do above and beyond that is basically point-scoring to make their product seem more attractive.

Quote directly from the Windows 7 development team:

"In Vista, we analyzed the impact of defragmentation and determined that the most significant performance gains from defrag are when pieces of files are combined into sufficiently large chunks such that the impact of disk-seek latency is not significant relative to the latency associated with sequentially reading the file. This means that there is a point after which combining fragmented pieces of files has no discernible benefit. In fact, there are actually negative consequences of doing so. For example, for defrag to combine fragments that are 64MB or larger requires significant amounts of disk I/O, which is against the principle of minimizing I/O that we discussed earlier (since it decreases total available disk bandwidth for user initiated I/O), and puts more pressure on the system to find large, contiguous blocks of free space. Here is a scenario where a certainly amount of fragmentation of data is just fine – doing nothing to decrease this fragmentation turns out to be the right answer!"

If you're looking for ways to speed up your PC, there's far more important things to be looking at than whether or not Windows' own defrag tool is efficient.

Any decent 3rd party ones you can recommend?

O&O

Bear in mind that Windows defrag used to be shite.

ah well, it must be about 3 years since I tried it, but it gave up leaving about 20% still fragmented after about 5 hours. I've not tried it on Windows 7. O&O runs in the background so whenever I check I'm usually on 0% fragmented, except it doesn't seem to touch those packaged file system files used for backup.

In terms of raw performance, I think I'd rather have a disk reporting 20% fragmentation than an on-demand defrag tool continually buggering about with my file system.

You're not still running Windows 95 there, are you?

Defragging your PC can improve performance but only in some circumstances. For instance you need access to a LOT of small files quickly. Otherwise you'll notice next to no difference at all.

Also as for your Desktop problem, if you are using Windows 7, you can't save anything there unless User Account Control is set to its lowest settings. By default, you can't save anything to your root C: drive or any system folders (including desktop).

UAC in Windows 7 is actually pretty good. It stops you putting things where you shouldnt and generally keeps your PC organised. It also stops programs from executing malicious code (Viruses) and seeks your permission before changing any settings.

Yes its true that some PC manufacturers create D drive. This is usually a recovery partition. If your PC goes tits up, you can restore to the factory settings using a CD. The CD reads from the D drive to restore your PC back to the way it was when you bought it.

Having a D parition on the same hard disk as the C parition is pretty pointless if you are seeking to secure your files from annihilation. If your C parition dies, it's likely that so will your D partition since its on the same physical disk. Also, you would have to set the 'user' folders to an area on the D drive for it it make any sense. ie, point My Documents to a folder on D.

Special folders such as My Docs, Music, Pictures etc can be set to different physical locations by right clicking on them and changing their locations. So you can move it to a larger disk if you want to.

So in answer to your question, if you are using Windows 7, reduce the User Account Control settings if you want to write to the desktop (via Control Panel > User Accounts). But best practice is not to write to the desktop at all, as by your own admission, you're not that good with computers.