Mr Stupid here!!

I went ahead & purchased/downloaded Window 8 Upgrade. Started installing it & of course as expected I hit a big bomb. I don’t have enough space on my hard drive. My hard drive is 71.0 GB & I only have 13.6 GB left. You need at least 16.0 GB on your hard drive for W8. I didn’t know this nor did the Windows Upgrade Assistant tell me. Here’s the thing, I don’t have any games or music on my hard drive, however I do have a lot of databases & Excel workbooks of my C-drive. I believe even if I remove ALL of those files from my C-drive it wouldn’t probable make much of a dent. I already did ALL of the disk cleanup several times. Damn, I knew that it wouldn’t go smoothly. Might anyone have any suggestions?

You could buy yourself a external hard drive for your DATA files.

I'm very sorry to be computer illiterate. What did you have in mind? Someting like a thumbdrive & what size would be best? When you say, 'DATA files do you mean my databases/excel files or other files?

Say somethinkon these lines.
Toshiba StorE BASICS 500 GB External hard drive ( portable ) USB 3.0 2.5" Matte black

Could i Run W8 off of an external drive or should i move files to the extrnl drive?

You should move your Documents, Music, Videos and Pictures (or some of that) to the external drive. A thumb drive would be too small, and big ones are expensive.

Hello DJ, and welcome to Eight Forums.

Afterwards, you could add/include these folders on your external drive to your libraries for easy access.

http://www.eightforums.com/tutorials/12954-library-add-folder-windows-8-a.html

Hope this helps,
Shawn

I concur with other's have said, it may be best to consider a USB external hard drive like theog has posted.

Also, in Windows 7, you can try to clean up some junk files. Hit the Start key, or the hit the Start button to open up the vestige of Windows UI history and type in disk cleanup. Let that run, and check off the items on that list. Since you're upgrading, no need to hold onto thumbnail previews! I would then pull up that vestige called the start menu and type in disk defragmenter. Hit the Defragment button, so when you upgrade it may take a bit quicker as the files on your hard drive just got consolidated and optimized for best access.

I would also check to see what programs that are installed, and uninstall the ones that you don't ever use, again to free up some space. Lastly, I'd check around your Libraries, or your user files (From the C drive when you open Computer, click on Users, then your account and go through the folders and see what you need or don't, let's call this winter sprucing shall we? )


Hopefully, this frees up enough space to install Windows 8. I believe 7 has this option, but 8 also has this; you can change the location of your user data folders. For example, normally your My Documents folder in your user account folder would be on the C drive, but you can choose to change it to be on, say, an external hard drive.

Much thanks for everyone' suggestions! If I get an external hard drive will I need to load on a O/S o be able to transfere files?

No, just copy (right click the files, and copy) and paste (right click, paste) on your external hard drive.