Question I bought an Acer Aspire laptop with a 14-inch screen about six years ago. Its hard drive now says that it is almost full — there’s just 0.4GB of space free. It won’t download anything for me anymore. I’ve taken photos, downloads and documents off the hard drive but it made no difference. I have used CCleaner (a PC decluttering program) a few times, too. I read that you should not defragment a solid state drive like mine. I am a pensioner (73) and I’m not really up to speed on all the tech stuff. I can manage most of the usual things like emails, photos and WhatsApp. How can I clean the hard drive to allow more space on it? I would appreciate your help very much. — Peadar Teehan, Tipperary
Answer
There are one or two approaches, here. You’ve already tried CCleaner, but did you try the built-in Disk Cleanup facility on Windows itself?
You do this by clicking the Start button and doing a search for ‘Disk Cleanup’. When you open this, you should be able to choose the ‘drive’ you suspect is full of unwanted clutter. Then choose ‘clean up system files’.
It should give you the option of choosing what kind of files (such as photos, videos, documents) that you’re happy to remove. The last action is to go back to the Start menu, pick ‘computer’ from your File Explorer, select the drive you just processed (or cleaned) and then hit ‘refresh’. That should free up at least a bit of space for you.
You might also consider getting rid of any desktop apps you find you’re no longer using. To do this, click the start button, then ‘programs’, then ‘programs and features’. If you click on any of the programs, it should give you the option to uninstall it.
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You said that you’ve removed some photos, downloads and documents off the hard drive — are there more you could remove? If so, and you think you’ll still need them at some point, you might want to consider one of the online storage options I’ve written about in the past (such as Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Photos, Amazon Photos and the like).
Finally, I’ll just add that six years is towards the end of a normal laptop’s life (they’re not like TVs or fridges). Many will go on for longer, but you might start to notice them creaking on things like battery life or glitching on things like memory.
Recommendation: Windows Disk Cleanup
Question
Many years ago I was lucky to win a HTC One phone. At the time I had a Nokia worth €25. It wasn’t long before I started using the new smartphone.
I was able to capture amazing photos but was not clever enough to download these or back them up. Soon, the charging port became unfixable. I tried several technology consultants to no avail.
There are photos on that phone of a relative, who passed away in 2015. Has anything been invented yet that would help me access these photos?
— Sinéad Slattery
Answer
In some ways, a phone is like a computer — it has internal storage like a hard drive. This can usually be accessed by a professional, but not quite as often by a casual user. One thing to try is to connect your phone to a PC to see if the handset shows up as an accessible drive. You say that the charging port is unfixable — I’m not sure whether you mean that it’s also useless for connecting to a PC, but I’ll assume that it is.
In this case, you’ll very likely be left looking for a professional data recovery service. I’m not sure what type of technology consultant you tried or whether you paid any money to them, but it might be worth asking a professional outfit like the Laptop Lab (at backfromthefuture.ie) to have a look at it. Bear in mind that professional data recovery intervention like this will cost money with no guarantee that all of the data will be retrieved.
Email your questions to aweckler@independent.ie
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