[criptonite]

I'm helping a friend who has a laptop with Windows XP SP2. The laptop only has a 10G hard drive and has run out of space. It was left with 4% space and wasn't enough to run a defrag. The laptop is running very slow. I've removed all temporary files, run disk clean up, removed all but the most recent system restore point and now the free memory is 12%, still not enough to run a defrag. I ran a file structure program found the following heavily used areas:

Windows directory - 67%
which is made up of the following: Installer - 21%, Software Distribution - 18.2%, System32 - 19.5%

Program files is very low as is My documents.

Can anyone suggest what can be removed safely to create more space?

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Try this and see if it helps.
Download TFC by OldTimer to your desktop

• Please double-click TFC.exe to run it. (Note: If you are running on Vista, right-click on the file and choose Run As Administrator).
• It will close all programs when run, so make sure you have saved all your work before you begin.
• Click the Start button to begin the process. Depending on how often you clean temp files, execution time should be anywhere from a few seconds to a minute or two. Let it run uninterrupted to completion.
• Once it's finished it should reboot your machine. If it does not, please manually reboot the machine yourself to ensure a complete clean.

Download Auslogics Defrag from the link in my signature below. Auslogics Defrag in my opinion is better because:

It does a more comprehensive job at Defragging
It will actually show you what it is doing
At the end of working it will show you how much speed you picked up
You can view a online log of the files that Auslogics defragged

[rshaffer61]

Try this and see if it helps.
Download TFC by OldTimer to your desktop

• Please double-click TFC.exe to run it. (Note: If you are running on Vista, right-click on the file and choose Run As Administrator).
• It will close all programs when run, so make sure you have saved all your work before you begin.
• Click the Start button to begin the process. Depending on how often you clean temp files, execution time should be anywhere from a few seconds to a minute or two. Let it run uninterrupted to completion.
• Once it's finished it should reboot your machine. If it does not, please manually reboot the machine yourself to ensure a complete clean.

Download Auslogics Defrag from the link in my signature below. Auslogics Defrag in my opinion is better because:

It does a more comprehensive job at Defragging
It will actually show you what it is doing
At the end of working it will show you how much speed you picked up
You can view a online log of the files that Auslogics defragged

[criptonite]

brilliant, thank you

[rshaffer61]

Did it clear out enough to run Auslogics defrag for you?
How is the system running now?
Being only a 10 gig hd it seems you may want to think about a larger capacity drive.