Computer runs too slow

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I have a Dell Inspiron 9400 and the 35g hard drive is full. I removed almost every file except the program files and it still says it is full. I do disk cleanups but it is too full to do a disk defrag. I have deleted programs that I know are unnecessary, and have accidentally removed some that are important. I have run the HijackThis scan, but I do not know what I can delete and what needs to stay. When I look at the amount of information that is in the folders on the hard drive I do not see anywhere near 35g of information being stored. Can anyone help me with this? Please
 
The Windows disk defragmenter is great except that you need lots of RAM free, Smart Defrag apparently only needs 30Mb. It's Free you can download it from iobit here
You probably should have posted in a "Topic" rather than in "Introduce Yourself"
 
I'm afraid the amount of shear crud that windows patches (aka updates) that MS forces on you is undeniably huge. Every patch has an uninstall routine and a log left behind. In no time these can add up to a Gb of useless space. A service pack tops out at 1 or more Gb. You can only see these by being an administrator user, and setting options to view system files. That is why so much space just seems 'lost'. If you know what you are doing patch logs etc can be deleted without bad effects

On a 35Gb machine, you are never going to have any space. Look into buying a new drive at once. It would have to be an IDE drive (I suspect, dont trust me on that, some 9400 can go up to 320Gb sata drives), you should be able to get one at least 80Gb for the price of a good dinner, and if new, it should come with a utility to clone your existing drive onto it, otherwise you will need some slightly specialised software (but still free). Sadly, that act of cloning is much less straightforward on a laptop than a desktop. It can be easier to take your HDD out and mount it in a knowledgable friends, along with a new big one, but special adapters are needed (very cheap). Cloning is then easy.

Unfortunately the whole alternative topic of clearing useless crud is a very large one. Look to start with anti-virus logs and updates, firewall logs, system restore points, have a fixed pagefile size and so on.
 
Unfortunately the whole alternative topic of clearing useless crud is a very large one. Look to start with anti-virus logs and updates, firewall logs, system restore points, have a fixed pagefile size and so on.
You could "go for" an external HDD and store things that you don't necessarily need to access on your main drive.

Also have you checked out how big you storage of your personal mail is? This you could easily store on an external\other drive. you will need a mail set-up system like Outlook express from M icro Sofft or Ubuntu Evolution mail client which I would recommend because the Ubuntu partition (on the external drive) would expand as you require more storage where as the Windows partition does not.
Try Ubuntu on a flash drive before moving to the more secure option, a new HDD here
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