New laptop

A 512 Gb HHD does not have 512 Gb useable.

512Gb will have around 490Gb usable.
In reality, your 512Gb should be using around 440GB maximum. This allows space to decompress, pagefile growth, etc.

 

I dislike the new Win11 display! It's so plain & FLAT! I wish I could have the silver/grey buttons & the XP display again! I was VERY DISAPPOINTED when I opened Win11 & found everything looked so PRIMITIVE! I've since made some changes in "Personalize" & things look a little better - but not a lot!

I've not been on here much lately as I've been playing around with making User accounts so as not to use the Admin account. I've also been changing between my old PC & this new one. For that I have to unplug everything & connect to the other one! I've done that on 2 or 3 occasions now but it's a right hassle!

Yesterday I was trying half the day to copy photos to DVDs to later install in the new PC. I found 4 or 5 disks that I'd never used & filled them to the brink but even so I still have a lot more to do! I found that 3 of the disks couldn't be read by the new PC! So I now have 3 DVDs full of photos that I can't reuse even though Win7 formatted them to use as recordable disks! The other two I've been able to use a couple of time. Once the photos were on the HDD I deleted all the content. I was able to do this at least twice but not being able to use the other 3 DVDs means the process will be a LOT SLOWER!

 

@pete did you run that Disc Clean Up app ?

What you might have missed is that after you click on that Clean Up System Files box, it comes back with another screen, which shows what old system files it has found, in our case Windows Update Clean Up, But you need to Tick its box for it work and delete them - see pic -

You should probably see something like that Plus one for - Window10.OLD 20.0 GB +

 

No I didn't run it @ricky101 as I thought gaining a couple of Gb wasn't worth it.
I'm always wary of deleting stuff that I didn't put on the system.

I wasn't sure which boxes to tick either.

I might have to wait 10 days anyway before I can delete it.

 

@Balc

Good to hear you are using User Accounts, another good way to increase your safety.

If you are wanting to use both desktops together more often you can get a KVM switch which allows you to share one keyboard,monitor and mouse between the two.

Think we would have used an external HDD or USB stick to copy the photos across, long time since we used DVD/CDs etc.
Another way would be to upload the pics via the web etc or just place the actual HDD in your new desktop and read off the pics that way, if its a Sata drive.

You do not say what your DVD Read problem was, drive read errors or Windows not liking the format, but might just be worth loading a program like VCL and seeing if that can read them ?

 

Just to add, I see @wiseowl has 54.9Gb being used by Windows.

 

Just try running that Disc Clean up, with 'Clean System Files' pressed, to the point shown on the image above and just cursor up and down that list and see if your can spot anything showing more than 5Gb like we mentioned.

Then press Cancel so its not run, then at least you will know if it is just old installation files.

Probably @wiseowl has a lot of programs already loaded or again has got a lot of old installation files waiting to be removed.

One advantage of doing System Image Backups is you can always get back if something goes wrong for any reason.
Just that there are lots of other things you can do to improve your pc use, but you probably have enough on the go at the moment.
To be honest, a Backup Image was the very first thing we did on our W11 so that if we did mess anything up, we could easily go back to a clean beginning.

 

I daren't ask how you do a backup image @ricky101 .

 

But would that remove an old windows 10 if it was on your HD?

 

Funny you should say that @wiseowl. Not having an SD slot on this new machine I now have to go in search of my camera cables. If I can't find them I'll have to invest in a card reader.

@Jocko I said on my post that the computer would be using some of that space.

 

Hi @Sheal

As mentioned earlier to Pete, you can buy these little SD to USB readers so cheaply.
You can get a larger on that does varoius sizes or the smaller ones that just fit one size card.
The work fine for us.

 

That is not what I meant. The space is not there to be used. it is to do with the way they describe the size of a Gb. A Gb of data is actually 1.024 Gb so "1 Gb" of storage can only hold 976 Mb. Storage tends to be quoted in decimal whereas data is actually a binary number.

 

I bought a card reader a couple of days ago.
Seems to work ok.