It’s easier to reallocate your disk space
Q: I have a Windows 10 system with one hard drive divided into two partitions: a C drive and a D drive. My C drive was configured to have 150 GB and the D drive 780 GB. Currently, the C drive has only 6.3 GB available, whereas the D drive has 701 GB. How can I allocate more to the C drive, taking some from the D drive? My computer is reacting very slowly to mouse movements on some programs. I think it might be caused by the low amount of space on the C drive.
A: You are probably correct that the limited space on your C drive is causing some performance issues. Windows, in the course of opening, closing and working within various applications, is constantly writing out what are known as scratch files. These are files that the operating system uses to keep track of changes you are making to images, documents and database files.
As you are using your PC, these scratch files are constantly being created, updated and deleted.
It is generally a good idea to have at least 20 percent to 25 percent of your total drive space available for this to keep your computer running efficiently. Otherwise the computer has to do a lot more work to keep track of all the changes.
The good news is that Windows 10 makes it very easy to resize disk partitions, meaning you can take some of your abundant space on the D drive and allocate it to the C drive using Disk Management, which is a built into the Windows 10 operating system.
Open the Control Panel, search for Partition, and click on Create and Format Hard Disk Partitions.
This will bring up the utility and will show you your various drives and partitions.
Here you can shrink the larger drive and then extend the smaller drive to use the space you freed up when you shrunk the larger drive.
There is a good indepth article on using this tool at the How To Geek website at tinyurl.com/helplinepartition.
I know that many oldschool computer users like to keep separate partitions on their computer. The thought is that by segregating data between the two partitions, the computer will run more quickly, and it will be easier to manage data and applications.
I am not convinced that’s as true today as it might have been in the past. Computers are much faster and backups are much easier to perform and maintain these days, but old habits die hard.
At least in the more modern operating systems you have built in tools like Disk Management to perform these tasks, whereas previously you needed a third-party application that was fairly expensive and not always easy to use.