Freeing up drive space ups efficiency
Q: I get a pop up window now and again regarding the hard drive disk space for my E drive. The message says something about cleaning up files. The drive is 298 GB in size and the amount of free space is 16.1 mb. Is this a problem?
A: When it comes to drive space it is always a good idea not to fill your disk drives completely with data, especially the drive where your operating system is installed.
Typically, on a computer running Windows, the operating system is installed on the main drive which is usually the drive designated as the C drive.
For Windows to run efficiently the operating system needs a certain amount of free drive space to be able to write data to in order to manage data and create the temporary files that are part of how the operating system works.
If the C drive becomes overly full, the operating system cannot perform effectively or efficiently, which can result in degraded system performance and even system crashes and other odd behavior.
As a general rule of thumb, I like to keep 15 percent to 20 percent of my operating system hard drive empty.
In your case where it is the E drive that seems to be the problem, I would assume that you either have a second hard drive installed on your computer or you have you primary hard drive partitioned in to two separate drives.
If this is indeed the case, then you don’t necessarily have a problem if the drive gets too full because the E drive is probably just being used for storage or as an alternate application installation drive.
That being said, Windows is going to keep nagging you about the limited free space until you address the issue.
I would recommend that you free up some space on your drive by deleting unnecessary files and uninstalling any applications you are no longer using. You might also consider adding another drive, either internal or external, to give yourself some more storage space as you appear to be running out. I don’t know of too many computer users who don’t keep adding more data to their system.
Q: Occasionally, without any apparent provocation, my computer screen jiggles and it turns pink. It will go on and off with this pink screen two or three times, and then stop and does not reoccur. What’s causing this?
A: I can think of two possible causes for this behavior.
The first is that your cable that connects the monitor to your PC is having a problem or experiencing some type of interference. Make sure that it is connected securely to the computer and to the monitor. If it turns pink for a longer period of time try wiggling the cable to see if the problem goes away.
The other explanation is that your monitor is in the process of going bad. If it is, it will eventually turn pink and stay pink. You can take it to a repair shop but if the monitor is more than a few years old it may not be worth fixing.