Relax. 16 gb is more than enough free space.

Relax. 16 gb is more than enough free space.

Well that's a matter of opinion, really. I think it's far too small, and I'd really like to do something about the excessive number of music files that have been building over the years. Then I'll be starting on the other files that have been building over the years.

And it's not really good when you're really into computer games, and gameplay suffers as a result. I want to free up some space by moving/deleting stuff, and then defrag whatever is left.

I really don't have an excuse, seeing as how I own this huge external harddrive and I'm not putting it to good use.

Don't worry about it. Sooner or later, your computer will die/hard drive will freak out, and the problem will solve itself!

What is the opposite of the verb "helping" ?
:(
Pretend I HAVE to do this. Pretend I don't have a choice.

CitrusFreak: I had to do something about this with my old machine, and I resorted to an external hard drive.

Fast question: are you able to point your music library software to a diffent directory without borking all your playlists n such? If so, that'd be a simple solution - just stick your music library on the external storage, point your iTunes or whatever there, and be done with it.

Logistics do come into play here. I mean in my current case this wouldn't work, as I have a macbook pro (laptop) so using a (large, not-very-portable) external HD to store my iTunes library kinda defeats the purpose of a laptop.

But if your machine is a desktop then certainly things like video, music and big photo files are space-hogging files you'd do well to banish to external storage (o and while yer cleaning house... er hard drives there, champ, go ahead and back 'em all up to DVD, too! ... can't hurt).

Another good thing to do is consider sorting your music files into folders/playlists, and storing the less used stuff on your external HD. My bf does this with the very limited onboard hard drive space in his laptop - he only devotes about 2gb of disk space to music at any time. it kinda means using it as he would any 2gb mp3 player. Does that make any sense?

I have a laptop, and I know exactly what you mean about defeating the purpose. But I guess I can't have my cake and eat it too.

I don't know if I can just tell iTunes "Oh btw, I moved all the music onto this drive. Just look there." Usually when I move a file it goes all "OMG FILE NOT FOUND. YOU WANNA LOOK FOR IT FOR ME??" and I politely decline. I can't imagine having to do that for 1,984 songs. If there is some way for me to do this, awesome. But I don't want to try and be wrong.

I think I'll give your folder/playlist idea a shot. I'll start big, I guess. "Songs I want to Destroy" "Songs I'm indifferent about."

Thanks, lonefrontranger.

Help deciding what to delete (some strategies to consider):
- Compartmentalize. Go through all the songs that start with 'A,' and get rid of the ones you don't want. Repeat with 'B.'
- Random play. Queue it all up and hit play. When you hear something you don't want, delete.
- Automate. Get rid of everything that hasn't been accessed since X date, or that hasn't been played at least Y times. This can be accomplished with iTunes, or with shell scripts, or plenty of other ways.

If deleting things will make you feel better, I say go for it. And if you need to defrag, that will certainly improve disk performance. But 16 gigs of free space on an 80-gig hard drive is nowhere near the point that would affect things negatively. Don't get me wrong--there may well be other things that are negatively affecting your HD performance, and if you suddenly want to download the entire run of The Simpsons, or a bunch of PS3 games or something, you may find that you don't have enough space available.

But if your hard drive is twenty percent free, then it's extremely unlikely that a lack of free space is the cause of your drive performance problems.

... o and another thing: even if it is a laptop, stuff like (especially) video files and photos should really be archived / burned to DVD. Video especially - obviously you went to the trouble to download it for some reason, and unless you're using these files everyday, there's no sense in keeping them onboard and hogging up your main processing storage.

Music is a little touchier, simply because it's highly likely you're going to want to randomly listen to things in your music library whilst using the computer.

Start with any low-hanging fruit, like... oh I dunno. Howzabout stuff like that terrible Justin Timberlake CD your x-three-times-removed-ago-girlfriend ripped into your iTunes when you were both too trashed and stupid to know better? if you hate it so much, then why in the Nine Million Names of Dog is it still infesting your hard drive?

I go by a very simple rule of thumb with music: if I haven't listened to it in the last 12 months, it gets deleted.

aaand on preview, what box said.

Maybe by file size? (This has worked surprisingly well for me in the past).

Your mention of external hard drives made me wonder what they were going for these days, and the answer (500GB for $200, 250GB for $125) was a pleasant surprise. Even better, they look like little books that fit nicely into your bookshelf. This makes me much happier than it should.

Thanks for the stategies, box and lfr. I'll try them out and see what works best for me.

LFR: I always backup my photos, first on the harddrive, then when that reaches a certain point I use DVDs. If I had to choose two things to grab in the event of a fire in the dorm, it'd be my laptop and my externalhardrive with all my photos. (In all three firedrills we've had, I've taken them both with me.) I can replace my camera. I can't replace all those pictures.

Any ideas on what could be negatively affecting my gameplay if it isn't my internet connection or the amount of free space on my hard drive? I used to be able to play with the highest settings, no problem. Now even the lowest settings are lagging a bit.

I kind of already know the answer: I have antivirus running (McAfee. I dont' know how to get rid of it) and a metric buttload of processes running in the background (I had to install a lot of stuff in order for my computer to connect to my university's LAN/wireless, including McAfee), many of which I don't know if I can end or not. On my old desktop, I could end the processes with some guesswork and no negative reactions and end up with maybe like 10 processes. Now? I have 77 F'ing processes running (!!!) and that is a problem.

If anyone could offer advice on how to tackle this problem as well, I would be most grateful.

CF my experience with uni network systems tells me that part of your problem might be with load on the university network. When I worked at CU, our LAN would slag out at around 1.30-2 PM everyday and not raise its ugly head again until about 8 or 9 in the evening.

And if they're requiring that you run a VPN or firewalls to connect to their wireless network, this could likely be causing trouble as well. Tho I have no clue how to solve that, since removing them would disallow you from connecting to their LAN.

IME wireless can be somewhat flaky, depending on the provider and the bandwidth. Do you have any options for trying a gaming session at a friend's house whilst hard cabled onto their DSL or cable modem? This would be a good test of whether it's *really* your computer's fault. Uni networks are almost always kludgy from what I've heard.

Hey, I'm the king of the world
I wanna save more songs
Running out of memory
Throw another hard drive on!
50-gig HD! 50-gig HD! 50-gig HD! 50-gig HD!

Gah! I tried to consolidate my iTunes library, and it's now telling me "Copying music failed. The file name was invalid or too long."

Does it tell me WHAT file name? NO!

I have no idea what to do now. :(

16gb free? You're lucky. I think I have 5 or 6 gb free (out of about 180) across three drives.

It wasn't broke! You're gonna break it! *runs away from thread*

:(

I have a laptop and run iTunes from an external hard drive. Attach the drive and turn it on, close iTunes, find and drag your entire music folder to the new drive. This will take awhile, it will be copying everything. Once it's done, open iTunes, go to Edit, Preferences, Advanced, point the iTunes Music folder location to the new drive. It should stay that way until you download something while you aren't attached to the external drive. Then you just do it again, it will consolidate the libraries. Once you verify that all of the music is on the external drive, you can delete what's on your laptop. I have been running mine this way for about 6 mos. and it's working out great. Let me know if you need better directions.

LFR: I always backup my photos, first on the harddrive, then when that reaches a certain point I use DVDs. If I had to choose two things to grab in the event of a fire in the dorm, it'd be my laptop and my externalhardrive with all my photos.

You need to have an offsite backup too. What happens if their's a fire while you're not home?

I mail encrypted copies to my Dad every time I make a backup DVD.

Anything you delete will become vital to your future happiness within the next week. Act accordingly.