Sunday 30 October 2011

Battle of the Bulge...ing hard drive

According to my computer, it only has 20 Gig left. (Huh, a whole 20 Gig! I remember when floppies were excessive storage... Hell, I remember my first computer, the Timex Sinclair 1000, which was just like the ZX81! But where the ZX81 only had 1K of base memory, the Timex Sinclair 1000 had a whole 2K! Yeah, suck it ZX81! Ah, but how I was envious of my cousins with their Spectrum with actual colour and ability to do proper sounds...)

Where was I? Oh, yes, 20 Gig. This is, as it is known, of course, a lie. I have far more than that, only the computer hasn't bothered to delete temp files. Moreover, having seen this before, it won't delete temp files until I give it room. Yes, it will only delete files when it has room to delete them...

Huh? You must have me confused with someone who doesn't think that is stupid.

(Yeah, I could run a defrag program, but where's the fun in that?)

Now, I do have a fair few programs to watch and clear out, so it's not like I'm only going to have 20 Gig for a while, but that isn't reason to complain. (Really, it is complaining about having less than 10% free.)

So, on the one hand, I have plenty of room! On the other hand, three shows later, and there's a gig gone straight away...

[END]

4 comments:

Foo said...

Dick Smith has 2TB hard drives for $128 at the moment... :-)

Jamas Enright said...

Oh yeah, can plug in extra drives, but this is on a laptop so can't replace it.

Bert Isla said...

I remember that same Timex Sinclair. I used to be part of a users club that did extensive hacks on that, Like a full sized keyboard and later a floppy drive (the REALLY big 8" floppies!). If you're running Windows and letting it manage your memory, it gets cranky when you have less than 10% free since it uses hard drive space for extra memory.

Jamas Enright said...

My dad created a new keyboard for our computer, a large box with the old keyboard on it. Really cool. (And had up/down/left/right switches we could wire to be any button for complete flexibility.) Still only had the tape drive...