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Starting Windows Explorer

jab1
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Re: Starting Windows Explorer

OK @penneck I don't know what is going on (nothing new there!), but now you've piqued my interest, any chance you could post a picture of the display you mention?

This is my 'C' :

Discspace.PNG

John
penneck
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Re: Starting Windows Explorer

jab1

I have tried loading a picture of my equivalent of what you showed in your post, but in spite of my picture being a pdf file, the process claims it is not in the correct image format (which includes .pdf). What have I done wrong?

jab1
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Re: Starting Windows Explorer

@penneck The easiest way of taking a screenshot in W7 is to use the 'Snipping Tool' which you will find  in 'Accessories' from your 'Start' globe. This creates a PNG file which you can insert into your post.

John
penneck
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Re: Starting Windows Explorer

C Drive.PNG I hope this worked. The picture is there but I would have liked to have made it a bit smaller

jab1
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Re: Starting Windows Explorer

It worked!Smiley

think, but am happy to be corrected, that your initial problem was caused by the very small amount of free space you had.

I know the answer to this question will probably be 'no', but is there any way of reducing the amount of data on 'C'?

How many restore points do you have on this drive? I keep mine down to  two, which is, IMO, enough.

John
penneck
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Re: Starting Windows Explorer

I've just taken a look at my restore points, and it seems I don't have any. Don't know why. Considering the problems I had a year or so ago, I'm surprised at that. There were problems with the restore points or lack of them then too.

Could it be that I am looking at the wrong place for them? System Protection was set to 'On' for the C: drive, so have I accidentally wiped the restore points when I did the Chkdsk, Defrag, etc? Do they automatically get wiped as they get old, without a replacement first? Am I not automatically generating restore points?

I have created a restore point now. I have a recovery load on an external hard drive if I need it, but that must be at least 6 months old. Should I keep that more up-to-date?

jab1
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Re: Starting Windows Explorer

Do you use CCleaner? There is an option on there to manage restore points, which is what I use.

Sorry, as I rarely use Chkdisk, I don't know what it does to things like restore points.

IF you have System Protection on, it should automatically create a Restore Point every 10 days (IIRC), the oldest gets 'wiped' when the space allocated for them gets full.

Backups should ideally be created monthly, keeping at least the last two - unless you do a lot of changes to your system, in which case they should be more frequent.

John
penneck
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Re: Starting Windows Explorer

Hi jab1,

Sorry for the delay responding, but I have just tried to use my external drive to do a new backup, and have spent about an hour failing to connect to it. The latest test was to connect it to another pc using the same usb cable and power supply, and it connected to that one okay so I seem to have a new fault on my pc. The icon that you use to 'eject' the drive connection safely identifies the drive, but doesn't give it a drive letter - could that be a result of Chkdsk?

Any idea how I can solve that one?

Re- your post about CCleaner, I haven't  tried managing restore points from it. If the space on the hard drive got too small perhaps it squeezed the existing restore points off without leaving the latest. I notice CCleaner says it wont touch the latest restore point when it does a clean, at least that's my understanding of it. How much disk space should I allocate to  a collection of 2 or 3 restore points?

I've got to go out soon, so I'm going off line for a few hours. In the meantime, thanks for your help

jab1
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Re: Starting Windows Explorer

No problems about delayed responses, @penneck - I'm going to be a bit slow tomorrow due to a few visitors Smiley .

Sounds like your machine might need a visit to/from an expert - you seem to be experiecing too many problems.Sad

Do you have another external or a pen-drive you could test re the 'no drive letter' problem? And no, that shouldn't be anything to do with Chkdisk.

As regaards the restore points, a correctly functioning machine would always leave at least one restore point. CCleaner will NOT delete the latest restore point, you cannot select it even if you wanted to try and delete it using that method.

 This blog post should help with regards to the question of 'how much disk space for restore points?' https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/robmar/2012/01/11/how-much-disk-space-does-system-restore-require/

John
penneck
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Re: Starting Windows Explorer

I have solved the Drive letter problem on that external drive - I used the software I used to move space from the E: Drive to the C: Drive. It has a facility for giving or changing a drive letter, so that's that. The drive is now available for a new backup.

jab1
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Re: Starting Windows Explorer

Glad you've solved that one!Smiley

John
penneck
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Re: Starting Windows Explorer

I've just completed the backup. Took nearly 3 hours. One question - do I have to make a Repair Disk every time I do a backup, or will today's one work for any backup?

jab1
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Re: Starting Windows Explorer

You only need to create a repair disc when you originality install the back-up program, or whenever there is a major update to the program, and you are prompted to do so.

Out of interest, which back-up program do you use?

John
penneck
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Re: Starting Windows Explorer

Right, thanks very much for all of your help

Graham