U810 Review

So if you have a Fujitsu U810, you know that one of its weak points is that it only comes with 40GB of hard drive space. With a Windows Vista Operating System installed, that doesn’t leave much room for any personal files for yourself.

I recently ran into this issue with mine. I am usually pretty good at managing disk space. I’ve had my Fujitsu U810 since February of this year and just a couple weeks ago I all of a sudden noticed that I only had about 3GB of free space left. Then last week I noticed I only at 1GB of space left. So I figured I had to find out what was taking up all of my space and what I could do about it.

I first checked how much space my personal files were taking up in my profile folder. It came out to be that I was only taking up about 5GB of space for all my files. So there was still a lot of unaccounted for space. I then found that there is a folder called WinSxS in the Windows directory on the C: drive. After doing a little research I found that it is the Windows Side by Side directory. This folder stores copies of all the DLL and system files that your programs require. Since different programs require different DLL versions, the WinSxS directory stores those versions for use with those programs. The research I did said that you really can’t do anything about the WinSxS directory and you can’t delete and of those files.

So I was still at a loss for what do to about my free space issue. I tried using the Disk Cleanup wizard, but was only about to free up about .5GB of space by deleting old dumps. I figured my only options were to purchase a larger 1.8″ drive or to see about compressing data I had on my current drive. So rather than purchase new equipment and try to copy an image of all my data over to a new drive, I decided to first see what compressing my files would give me. I set file compression on my entire C: drive (omitting system files of course) and after about 4 hours, it was complete and it freed up an additional 10GB of free space.

I finally had to check performance to make sure that performance was not hindered by having compression on every file I was accessing. After using it for the last day I have not found any significant or noticable decrease in performance due to the compression. Hopefully this last 10GB of free space will last me awhile.