One of the less lovable features of the Behemoth laptop is that Sony, in their wisdom, set up the 60Gb hardrive with a 15Gb system partition, a 5Gb recovery partition, and a 40Gb partition for everything else.
15Gb really isn't very big, even though it's bigger than the whole hard drive on the previous (Win98) laptop, when it has to hold Windows XP, Office, most of my other software, and all the other things a system disk needs. Also, I have a bad habit of sticking downloaded stuff on the desktop.
So tonight I was updating iTunes, and it started whining about disk space. It was down to about 200 Mb on the c: partition, so I moved a bunch of junk to the general-purpose partition; about 800Mb, all told. So how much space is left on c: now? 700Mb. Even after rebooting. What happened to the other 300Mb? The only thing I can think is that virtual memory is expanding to fill the available space. At this point the disk is too full even to defrag, and there really isn't much in the way of 'unneeded files' at all. Dumping OpenOffice, which I installed for some reason but have never used, and dumping a few big files, got me back over 1G, which is a bit better, but still cramped. (Pretty much all my photos and music, and two big software things, live on the d: partition anyway.)
I think this could be the point at which I start seriously looking for a replacement for this machine. In a way this seems entirely stupid, but reformatting the whole thing in a sensible fashion would presumably lose me the factory-installed software including Windows. And I'm not sure I've ever been able to use the DVD burner, except to make the recovery disks, because of the scratch space issues.
