Mini 9, 8GB Almost nothing installed, No Storage

Not sure if this has been asked before, but I didn't find it in a search.

My wife got the Mini 9 at Best Buy yesterday, with 1GB Ram and 8GB HDD.

The HD measured 7.1 GB in Windows with about 3GB free.

I took McAfee Security off it (don't like it and only 30-day trial), loaded AVG Anti-Virus, Windows Defender, Word 2000, and IE 7 and the latest Windows security upgrades.

Now it has less than 1GB left free. (And .NET framework 3.5 wouldn't load - possibly due to memory).

I don't know if there are temporary files that I could delete, but I am concerned that in six months, she won't be able to load security fixes b/c the HD is full.

How are others handling this, and is this typical?

I am considering telling her to return it for an Asus with a real HD. I know there are 16GB and 32GB SSD cards out there, along with external HD's, but don't want to deal with that expense and bother.

Thanks in advance!!!!

 

I would have gone for at least the 16GB. I don't know exactly how much Windows itself takes up, but I imagine it has to be a considerable amount.

You could try defragmenting, although I doubt it will do much good with that small of a drive.

Also, try deleting your temporary files folder. On Vista, it's C:\Users\[username]\AppData]Local\temp

It should probably be similar for XP.

 

What OS are you running, just out of interest?

You could try clearing your system restore points, as well as downloading CCleaner here.

 

Try downloading and installing WinDirStat: http://windirstat.info/

Great little utility that tells you what and where everything is on your disk.

 

I think you should return the Mini 9 for a netbook with a real HDD, like an Asus. Even if you did everything suggested by the posters above, it will at most save you a couple hundred Mb...

 

If one of your primary needs when you obtained the netbook is HD space then, in my opinion, the Mini is probably not the machine for you or your wife. This is especially true since you have already stated you did not want to invest in a larger SSD.

My girlfriend loves her Mini but her primary needs were needs other than the HD space. For my girlfriend her primary needs were related to the size, weight, noise (or lack of), and the design of the machine. For her space wasn't an issue since she was going to primarily use the Mini for taking notes in class.

We got the 16GB drive with XP as my girlfriend didn't want to bother with Linux. Just installing Word, Excel & PPT with some others basics (anti-virus etc.) we well exceeded 8GB. Even for my girlfriend's "light" use she would not be able to use a Mini with only a 8GB SSD.

 

Is there any giant need for more portability than is offered by 13" or 15.4" net/notebooks? I mean, unless you're looking to use it on a bus or something, I never understood the need for tiny machines...

 

Buy a 16 or 32 gb SDHC card.

And, why are you running so many anti-virus programs. Its going to bog down your system. Just set up the firewall and dont install any spyware.

Also, turn off Hibernate function and Recovery (both are terrible memory hogs). Also, run disk cleaner once in a while and clear out the temp and error report files; i did this yesterday and restored about 1.2 GB of space on my 32gb SSD.

 

Recovery should already be turned off by default, it was on my 16gb flavor at least.

As shipped it had 8gb free of 15.4gb real space.
Turning off the swap file freed 1.5 gigs(with 1gb ram and a boot of 178mb i don't need swap, and the last thing the SSD needs is to have a file written to constantly on it), uninstalling programs i knew i wouldn't use (works cause openoffice works better and is smaller, and so on) saved another gig or so. Turning off hibernate will save equal space to your ram (1gb ram, it saves 1gb hd space)
All together i managed to get it to 10.5gb free space, and there is still another 200-300mb i can cut out, too.
That's with firefox and open office installed.

 

Trying to answer all the posts in one reply ...

I think the reply above is the most helpful.

The machine was somewhat a "spur of the moment" purchase at Best Buy. BB only had the 8GB SSD version. If I could have gotten the 16GB version for $40 more there, or could swap the 8GB for 16GB for $40, we would have (although I don't have a USB CD-ROM, so re-loading Windows on a new SSD will not be pleasant).

We are running WinXP SP3 - that came on the computer - but it's also what all our other machines run.

She has a 17" laptop also, and wanted something small that could come down to the kitchen or out on the porch. The 14-inch won't help - heavier and bulkier than she wants ...

I am not running much Anti-Virus on it. I installed AVG free and Windows Defender. She's not especially careful what websites she goes to (she's not especially risky either), but I won't run it with less than that. (It came with a 30-day trial of McAfee Security and I deleted and removed that)!!! I am NOT running both.

It isn't so much a NEED for HD space - I expected Windows to take up about 1GB (naive - but I remember DOS and Win 3.1), and leave about 7GB for installing 2 or 3 main apps. That didn't happen. She wanted Word on it, but it is mainly for web surfing. But she liked Google Desktop that came with it, and I know she is eventually going to get to where something that she likes can't be installed on it or something else needs to go to make room for it.

I installed and ran CCleaner last night, but it only cleared about 60Mb of internet files.

The computer has about 1.6 GB free, so it's not as bad as I thought. It's Windows directory is about 2.91 GB, but several others in the house range from 3.0 to 6.9 GB. Obviously the last one would be a problem.

I'd say it could just work for what she wants now, but an Asus EEE has 120 GB storage and would NEVER have any issues with storage space, but she prefers the design of the DELL, and it is her machine, so I'm trying to make it work if we can.

I do have a new question, though. In the root folder, there were four folders with fairly long meaningless names ....
abeh35830fodro0209erwou020 (made up buy as an example). Two of them were 64Mb and two were 264 Mb. They all had about 15 subfolders like 1033, 1251, 1041, etc.

I could delete these and free up another 500Mb of space, but I didn't know what they were and didn't want to delete them if they were important.

Anyone know?

 

Sounds like the best (and cheapest) option - SDHC cards are relatively cheap.

Just remember to back up the SDHC card on occasion - IMO they are still a bit unreliable.

 

Thank you (and ImakE originally).

I read that quickly and originally thought he was suggesting a 16 GB or 32GB SSD card.

I considered a USB drive or flash drive, but the SDHC card will not stick out of the machine, and I can get a 16GB one for $30.

Great suggestion!!!!

 

Before you make a SDHC purchase you might want to, if you have not already, take a look at this thread. I found it a very good read: http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=4258

I do not use a SDHC card in our Dell Mini so I cannot comment on it however there is a lengthy thread over at mydellmini about using the SDHC: http://mydellmini.com/forum/sdhc-use-t101s0.html

Hopefully those links help you.

 

Thank you MrNYC.

Both those links were very informative. Lots of people on the mydellmini site running programs from the SDHC and even installing it as a HD (in Explorer).

Again, it it were my laptop, I'd go with at least a 40 GB Hard Drive, but it's not, and the SDHC card looks like it might ensure that it's not unable to install any new programs on inside of six months.

Thank you again!!!

 

I think we are keeping the Dell Mini, but I have a couple more questions:

Anyone know if the folders I asked about earlier can be deleted - they are multi-letter files in the root directory - I think they might have been put there by the .NET framework install, but don't know if they are still needed.

Also - there has been a lot of talk about the difficulties of restoring these with a USB thumb drive. The SDHC card looks like it might be a good workaround for this, but from the thread I found on installing from a USB key, it implied that the problem with that was that Windows installed the USB drivers after the OS load. If that is true, why doesn't the same problem occur with restore from a USB CD drive. (I don't have a USB CD drive, but was just curious).

Thanks!

 

Those sound like they might be driver installation folders (they are just C:\abeh35830fodro0209erwou020 and so forth, right, not C:\System Volume Information\abeh35830fodro0209erwou020?). What's inside of the subfolders?

They definitely aren't needed by Windows XP (I'm assuming that's the version the Mini is running since it has an 8 GB hard drive). I'm running XP just fine with no such files, including system and hidden files. I highly doubt they're needed by AVG - seems like far too large of files for an anti-virus program.

 

I would just get another SSD and plunk it in there. Stick the 8gb in a case and use it for backups or something. Otherwise, I would TURN OFF system restore, drop the HDD usage on IE7 (default is like, what, 50mb?)

Or, I would try to use puppy linux . . . its an OS that can run on system memory. You can use your actual storage to save files and customizations, but basically have access to almost all 8 g's. : P just a thought.