There’s trouble ahead if disk drive is getting full
Q: I noticed my computer was running very slowly and started looking around and notice that my C drive was about 95 percent full. Could this be contributing to the slowness?
A: Microsoft recommends that computers running the Windows operating system should maintain about 20 percent free space on the drive where the operating system is installed.
This is because Windows is constantly writing and erasing data to the system drive as part of its normal operation.
If your drive is almost full it will not only slow your system down, but it could also corrupt your data.
To see how much drive space you are using, just open File Explorer and then click on
This PC on the left side of the window and you will see all of the drives connected to your computer. Each drive will have a bar underneath it that will either be blue or red. If it’s blue, you’re ok. If it’s red then you are getting low on disk space.
In the past I have suggested a tool called WinDirStat from windirstat.net to scan your drive to see what’s using up space. It’s still a very good tool, but I recently found another tool called WizTree from diskanalyzer.com/download that seems to run much faster. They are both free for personal use and I have used them many times to find files that could be moved to another drive or files that were no longer needed that could just be deleted.
Drive space is one of the most important factors to consider when buying a computer. It’s right up there with memory and CPU speed. And fortunately, it has come down in price significantly so there’s no reason to skimp on this part of the configuration when exploring a new computer.
Q: I recently had to update my email password and now I am having trouble getting new messages on my mobile phone. Is there a quick fix for this?
A: Sometimes a mobile device can be very finicky about updating your account settings. I don’t know why. But I run into this all the time with both Android and Apple phones.
The easiest way to fix this is to just delete the account, reboot the phone and then readd the account.
It works every time. And the good news is that you don’t lose any mail or contacts or anything like that. You just add the account and, in a few minutes, you’re done.