Sony VAIO Laptop

[The Flying Pram]

My niece has just been round to download some photos we took at her birthday party last night but it appears her Hard Drive is full... I didn't have time to investigate much, but it seems the HDD is divided in to two 40 Gb partitions, "C" & "D". C is virtually full, whilst D is empty. We tried selecting D and were able to copy the photos to it, but there is no normal menu tree - "My Documents" >> "My Pictures" etc. I then tried opening C and get the "Warning Hidden Files / Folders" message. My query is how would this be organised? I assumed that operating system files, and maybe programmes would be on C, and all documents on D. In which case why would it be divided equally? Could someone shed any light on this? I've already told her to get an external drive, but if there is still 40Gb available it would be handy to use it.

Thanks, TFP.

[Spitoon]

I don't know how Sony sets up installations and hidden restore partitions etc. but it sounds like the D drive is a straightforward partition - it just doesn't have any folder structure on it.

You can create folders on it (of whatever names you want) and move files around just as you can within 'My Documents' on the C drive. By default I think all Windows installations set up 'My Documents' within the 'Documents and settings folder on the C drive - you can change this if you want, say to the D drive, it's not too difficult but I think you may need to manually move the existing files to the new location. On the other hand, maybe you just want to keep photos there so just set up folders for each party or whatever.

[The Flying Pram]

Thanks, I think she's coming round again this afternoon so I will get a bit more time to investigate. There were a number of text files on the D partition which had rather registry type names, but we put them in a separate folder. I will endeavor to move some files over from one to the other.

[PPRuNeUser0211]

TFP -

Vaios usually have their hard disks formatted into 3 partitions.

a recovery partition that you can't see from windows and is usually left un-tinkered with...

c: is the one that has windows, all the programs and "my documents" (plus pictures music et al) on it by default.

D: is usually an empty partition, available for file storage, but in my experience rarely used as the "average" laptop user barely realises it's there. Thus C: fills up, they run out of space and go and by an external drive from pc world for 100 notes!

My advice is to scour her laptop for photos and music (the two big offenders amongst the younger generation...) and move them in toto to d:

If she's using I-tunes then re-configure it to use the new d: folder as her default music directory. If you simply "move" (as opposed "copy") "my documents" and the sub folders to d: you should be given an option to make that folder the official my docs in it's new location. (I believe this came up in a thread recently, I would put down an exact description of the process but I'm at work and time is short, would you believe!) Someone help me out?

In short, anything that is big and accumulates over time, move to D:, and educate her to use it!

[Captain Sensible]

I have a VAIO: well known and documented problem. You can move "My Documents" to the "D" drive, (this will include I Tunes as it it should be in the "My Music" folder), - go to Microsoft Support; here's the link

How to Change the Default Location of the My Documents Folder (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310147)

and you can also move the Swap File to the "D" drive; Control Panel/System/System Properties/Advanced/Performance/Settings/Advanced/Virtual Memory/Change and select which drive to put the Paging File, (do NOT do this to the Hibernate File).

Any future programs, install into D/Programs.

Hope this helps.

[The Flying Pram]

Thanks for the further suggestions, I've also got some advice from other sources regarding re-sizing the partitions. Until I get a look at it I'm not sure which approach to take. Now I'm just waiting for her to bring it back round here. Obviously other things are more important at the moment.....
TFP