Hard drive boot

Ballboy

Hi Guys

Have two hard drives in the computer at the moment.. one significantly bigger than the other but I think the computer is running off the smaller one which is slowing me down..

How do I find out which one it is booting off and how can I change them??

Thanks

demanufactured

whcih of the 2 drives is the C: drive in your computer?

Solitaire

It only slows you down if the bigger one is also faster spinning/reading than the smaller one

There are a few ways to find out which is which, easiest way is to leave your cursor over C:\ in My Computer and see what total capacity it says on the tooltip that pops up

the untitled user

What demanufactured said, open up my computer and see the list of drives there to see which is C.

Generally speaking the hard drive is rarely the bottleneck in any system. Only if it's very full (i.e. greater than 90%) does it affect performance significantly.

First step is to free up space. Under Start -> All Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools you can find the disk clean up component of windows, this will get rid of some of the unnecessary files windows has added to itself over the life of the machine. Another good practice is to download a program called CCleaner that will clean up the temporary files applications leave behind after them. And it should go without saying that you should uninstall any applications you no longer use. This should free up a good bit of space.

Once you have a bit of space freed up you should defragment the drive (which will rearrange how the files are stored on disk so they can be accessed more efficiently). From the same site linked above you can download a program called Defraggler to do this.

In my own experience though the most common cause of a slow system is too many programs running on startup. Stuff like Windows Live, Skype etc. if you have more than 3 or 4 icons in the system tray than you probably have too much running. Most apps can be prevented from starting up in their preferences, and if you can't shut them down then CCleaner can also be used to disable them.

Unregistered.

the untitled user wrote: »

Generally speaking the hard drive is rarely the bottleneck in any system.

Um, great username and all - original as it is - but the hard drive is THE bottleneck in most systems nowadays!

old_aussie

Unplug one of the drives and see if the PC boots, that will tell you which HDD the PC is booting from.

What OS are you running?

the untitled user

Unregistered. wrote: »

Um, great username and all - original as it is - but the hard drive is THE bottleneck in most systems nowadays!

Heh, fair point. What I meant to say is that the size of the hard drive in any system is rarely the bottleneck.

Ballboy

Thanks for the replies..

The Smaller hard drive(32 gb) is the C drive which I'm worried about now..
Im on windows xp..

Unregistered.

Ballboy wrote: »

Thanks for the replies..

The Smaller hard drive(32 gb) is the C drive which I'm worried about now..
Im on windows xp..

Do you definitely have two hard drives? As opposed to two partitions on one hard drive?

Ballboy

Yeah i have a C drive and then an E drive aswell with 160gb..