How can I get hard drive space... without deleting (my) stuff?

[Jammo the OrganizedFellow]

USB flash drive!?

8GIG?
I got mine for under $40 with a coupon at Costco.

[wreckedcarzz]

I was able to boot off the SD card, but apparently the zip release is broken... it wouldn't boot past the mode selection screen.

I'll have to search around for a "real" USB stick and try again.

Stop talking your parents into buying you old IBMs and Macintoshes so that when you need something you can really use, they'll have the money for it.

-Deozaan (June 16, 2008, 10:34 PM)

An $8 IBM laptop is a good investment

[Grorgy]

An $8 IBM laptop is a good investment

It'd be a great investment if it had a big hard drive in it! 

[Jimdoria]

16gb thumb drive = about $30 on eBay.

Are you using folder compression? Folder -> Properties -> General tab -> Advanced... -> check "Compress contents to save disk space" then say OK.

Works better for some file types than others, but if you've got lots of MS Office documents or uncomressed files like WAV or BMP, you could see some gains. Wouldn't do this on the WINDOWS folder, though.

[f0dder]

You should only use NTFS Compression on "mostly read-only files" - ie., files that don't get written to very often. Why? CPU usage is a small factor, fragmentation is the big factor.

Doesn't work all to well on WAV/BMP (use MP3 and JPEG/PNG compression for those), but does a good job on text files (including source code), executables, et cetera. NTFS Compression is a LZW variant, so you can basically expect it to work for the same types of files that ZIP works for.

Windows folder is OK, never compress boot.ini, ntdetect.com or ntldr, though.

[wreckedcarzz]

I used to compress the whole drive for that extra bit of space, but when things go belly up and you lose everything because you told windows to compress the drive and it compresses the system files too, things don't look good at that point. Hence the reason that I don't do it anymore. When Windows starts (literally) killing itself, bad things happen.