Kevin, first off, it would help if you knew what the actual size of the hard drive is. your computer will have many areas in which it will save temporary files (not simply your internet files) which will accumulate over time and take up space... if you are using a large hard drive such as 40gb, you may not notice much difference. if you are using a small hard drive, such as less than 3gb, then you may notice a difference in the percentage of free space on your drive.
there are many options available to you when this is occuring. you can find someone who knows what they are doing to sit down at your computer and clean out all the unnecesary files, or you can purchase software online which will do something similar to this for you (i personally have not tried any of this software so i'm not sure how effective it is, maybe someone can chime in). you can also reformat your hard drive, which i personally think is a healthy event for your computer if done from time to time, especially if you have been using your hard drive for a long period of time without ever formatting it. the catch is, it's not an easy process for a non-literate computer user. my best advice, if you have no friends who are good with computers, try making friends with one at a local computer shop, or someone online. obviously you are going to have much better luck if you can find someone who will sit down in front of your computer with you. at the very least you can find someone online who will write you an easy to use step-by-step guide to formatting your hard drive. a word of caution about this, the older your system, the more work it will be to replace important device drivers once you have wiped your drive clean. do NOT attempt to format your hard drive without accumulating the required discs and floppies you will need to replace everything. as for defragmentation: if my hard drive had three large files on it (this is obviously just an example) and i saved them on it in order: file1, file2, file3... then i deleted file2... so my hard drive would look like: file1, <blank space>, file3 and next i went to save a new file, file4... but file4 is larger than file2 was and when your drive saves the information physically, it begins to write file4 in the space that was previously occupied by file2. when it runs out of physical space there it will continue writing file4 in the space after file3. now my hard drive looks like this: file1, file4(partA), file3, file4(partB) therefore file4 is physically fragmented; the data is broken up into different physical locations on the disk. this is what happens every time you save data to your hard disk. defragmenting your disk is the process in which your computer goes through all the data and reorders it, so that the data for each file is kept together, making your system far more efficient. hope this answers some questions, i'm posting to the list in case anyone else wanted to know as well. Ghost _______________________________________________ etree.org etree mailing list <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://mail.etree.org/mailman/listinfo/etree Need help? Ask <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
