"Not possible" to add a second hard drive seems a very odd comment to me Bus Driver. However it is entirely possible he knows something we do not seeing he built the machine. Let's investigate.

If it were me I would add a second hard drive - after evaluating the system to ensure I could of course. Then I would remove some or all of my programs (except Windows of course) and re-install them on the new drive, D:. This is quite simple and safe, Windows remains on the C: drive and all the needed pointers for each program installed on the new D: drive would also be on the C: drive but pointing to the new drive.

OK so let's start off easy like. Download and run SIW, linked below, by Gregory Topala. This is a tiny program that will tell you all about the innards of your confuser.

Look down the left side in the hardware section and click on the motherboard, after a few seconds the info should appear on the right side. You can either post it here or google the motherboard and see what is had onboard.

I suspect it will have 2 IDE headers which allows you to install up to 4 IDE devices i.e. Hard drives and/or DVD player recorders. Right now you likely have the master header only populated and the hard drive runs as the master with your DVD device as slave. This means we can use the secondary IDE header for your next hard drive.

Alternately you can remove the side and look on the motherboard for the make and model number. Often this is etched in between the PCI (white or creamy coloured) slots

How are we doing so far?

Here is a link that might be useful: System information Window

I would suspect a 3 year old computer might have Serial ATA hard drive technology. Most newer motherboards I've seen have support for 4 SATA hard drives. They also support IDE because most CD/DVD drives still use IDE. That means a capacity for 8 internal drives.

USB external hard drives are also quite popular. Most come with an external power source and connect to a USB port. They run better with USB 2.0, but a 3 year old computer should definitely have support for USB 2.0. Even if it doesn't, you can probably add an expansion card that supplies USB 2.0 ports. I have several external USB hard drives and they work very well.

The suggestion that your computer might be able to handle a 200 GB drive is also a little strange to me. I just install a 500 GB drive in a 5 year old computer and it works well. A 200 GB drive is kind of old technology these days and a larger drive would probably cost a few dollars more.

Finally, most hard drives have some files that can be removed. Have you tried clicking Start, My Computer, then right-click your hard drive (probably drive C) and select Properties from the screen menu. Then click the Disk Clean button. You may also have some programs loaded that are not used. Click the Start button, Control Panel, then Add/Remove Programs. Take a look at the list of programs it will generate and see if there is anything you may have loaded that is not being used. Many people try shareware programs and games, then fail to remove them when they are no longer used. Be careful not to remove anything you are not sure of.

Just out of curiosity, how much are they going to charge you for the new 200 GB hard drive and file transfer?

Is there another computer shop that will offer a free estimate on the installation of a second drive?

The new HD plus data transfer is estimated at $165.00. Sounds high to me, but they stay busy at their prices, plenty of customers. Generous with free help on the phone too.

lets clear one thing up first memory and Hard Drive space are 2 different things. Memory is RAM and you can usually add RAM easily to any computer. Hard Drive space is taken up by programs, and stuff you have put on the computer like pictures, videos, music files, documents. If you have a lot of pictures or music files it will quickly fill up your hard drive space. If that is the case you might want to think about burning the pictures, music, videos etc to discs (cd or dvd) and get it off your hard drive that will free up a lot of space.
When is the last time you did a disc clean up or a defrag? I would definitely do both of those and see how it looks.

The best free program I have seen to show you exactly what is on your computer is Belarc Advisor. You can download this little program and have it give you a report which you can print out and keep handy.
http://belarc.com/free_download.html

External USB drives or flash drives are excellent for storing some of the stuff you do not have to have on your main drive.
I can not imagine why you would not be able to add another drive to your computer that is strange indeed.

At the link posted, the Motherboard is listed as Dell 0F8098, Chipset Intel 945G Processor, Intel Pentium D 4000 MHz. Looks as if my computer is only about two years old. They ran it for about 6 days after assembly, according to this printout.

Here is the information from Belarc when the computer was newer.

Operating System System Model
Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2 (build 2600) MICRO-STAR
INTERNATIONAL CO., LTD MS-7125 1.0
Enclosure Type: Desktop
Processor a Main Circuit Board b
1.80 gigahertz AMD Athlon 64
256 kilobyte primary memory cache
1024 kilobyte secondary memory cache Board: MICRO-STAR INTERNATIONAL
CO., LTD MS-7125 1.0
Bus Clock: 201 megahertz
BIOS: Phoenix Technologies, LTD 6.00 PG 06/23/2005
Drives Memory Modules c,d
80.02 Gigabytes Usable Hard Drive Capacity
74.64 Gigabytes Hard Drive Free Space

LITE-ON DVDRW SOHW-1693S [CD-ROM drive]
3.5" format removeable media [Floppy drive]

ST380817AS [Hard drive] (80.03 GB) -- drive 0, s/n 5MR3MRXY, rev
3.42, SMART Status: Healthy 512 Megabytes Installed Memory

Slot 'A0' has 512 MB
Slot 'A1' is Empty
Slot 'A2' is Empty
Slot 'A3' is Empty
Local Drive Volumes

this is a picture of your motherboard

[IMG]http://i31.tinypic.com/2wcgxer.jpg[/IMG]

someone is telling you wrong

http://i31.tinypic.com/2wcgxer.jpg

copy and paste this in address bar

From the info that you posted, it says you 80GBs usable hard drive space and says you have 74GBs free space (meaning you have only used about 6GB). You have lots of room left on your HD. Another 512MB of memory would go along way to speeding up your computer

Bus Driver,

The IDE port on your motherboard is full since you only have one and it is maxed out with the two drive capacity of your hard drive and DVD drive.

As indicated, you do have 4 SATA connectors as I thought you might. You can easily add another SATA type drive to your system. Either the computer tech that looked at your system missed the SATA slots (highly unlikely) or they want to sell you an IDE hard drive.

On the other hand, $165 is not such a bad price for an installed 200 GB drive and an image transfer.

I would purchase a SATA drive and have the image of your current drive transferred to the new one. The SATA is going to be faster then your current drive and having the operating system on the faster drive will speed up your computer. Also, the larger capacity of the new drive will help keep your files from fragmenting and result in more speed as well.

A transferred image from your old drive should be exactly the same. The only difference will be the increase in speed.

If you don't want to do the work on your own, I think the $165 would be reasonable if they do two things. First, they should install a faster SATA drive and transfer the image of your old drive. Then, they should reformat the old drive and leave it in the computer as additional storage capacity.

If you write down and post the specs of the drive they are offering you, I'm sure someone here will tell you if it is a decent hard drive.

Belarc shows this today. This is the best copy/paste I could do.
Operating System System Model
Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2 (build 2600) MICRO-STAR INTERNATIONAL CO., LTD MS-7125 1.0
Enclosure Type: Desktop
Processor a Main Circuit Board b
1.80 gigahertz AMD Athlon 64
256 kilobyte primary memory cache
1024 kilobyte secondary memory cache Board: MICRO-STAR INTERNATIONAL CO., LTD MS-7125 1.0
Bus Clock: 201 megahertz
BIOS: Phoenix Technologies, LTD 6.00 PG 06/23/2005
Drives Memory Modules c,d
80.02 Gigabytes Usable Hard Drive Capacity
4.18 Gigabytes Hard Drive Free Space

LITE-ON DVDRW SOHW-1693S [CD-ROM drive]
3.5" format removeable media [Floppy drive]

ST380817AS [Hard drive] (80.03 GB) -- drive 0, s/n 5MR3MRXY, rev 3.42, SMART Status: Healthy 512 Megabytes Installed Memory

Slot 'A0' has 512 MB
Slot 'A1' is Empty
Slot 'A2' is Empty
Slot 'A3' is Empty

Based on what I see on the later Belarc report bus driver already has a SATA drive but it is 95% full. This also has a 5 year warranty according to the link below.Add another drive

Here is a link that might be useful: Seagate SATA hard drive

Apparently a microstar motherboard.
You can either add another Hard drive or clone yours over to a larger one.. If I was getting a new hard drive I wonder what the speed of yours is now ? Just looked at NewEgg and a fster drive is 99 bucks ...
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 500GB 3.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard - OEM

* 500GB
* 7200 RPM 16MB Cache
* SATA 3.0Gb/s

Be nice to have your Windows on the Faster hard drive if its not already a 7200 rpm drive existing,,, which I would think Belarc would show that somewhere.
What do you do that might use so much hard drive space ?
XP itself after a couple years is maybe 10gb at most. I can imagine your drive is complaining for quiet a while. Think it starts complaining when less than 15% free.

My xp laptop windows is 3.5 gb. Its whole drive is 15gb and has 10 gb free.

Here is a link that might be useful: http://www.msicomputer.com/product/p_spec.asp?model=K8N_Neo4_Platinum&class=mb

You really need to figure out what you have on that hard drive that is taking up so much room.

Do some house cleaning searches on that drive and see where the big files are living and that is where you need to start.
I would bet what ever it is you could easily burn to dvd or cd or move to a thumb flash drive and get it off that drive to free it up.
Do you have a ton of pictures?

I would also consider one of the free online storage sites that would allow you to move quite a bit off your drive and store it online.
I use www.ADrive.com and www.mediamax.com both offer very generous amounts of free space. A Drive gives 50Gig free and mediamax 25Gig free. With those options you could easily slim down your drive load.

I personally love having a stand alone USB hard drive I can use it on any of my computers that way since it is not a built in.

I agree I sure would head to newegg and find some additional memory for it, 512 is ok but you really would profit from having at least a Gig of memory. Belarc should tell you just what you have and what you would need to get. You have 4 slots to work with.

ok wait a minute on the one post you said it was :
Motherboard is listed as Dell 0F8098, Chipset Intel 945G Processor, Intel Pentium D 4000 MHz.

then in the Belarc info it shows it as being:
Processor a Main Circuit Board b
1.80 gigahertz AMD Athlon 64

I am confused?? am I misunderstanding something? Entirely possible LOL

I think someone is confused or playing a joke

Seems to me both Belarc reports show the Micro Star mobo listed below.

The Dell 0F8098 listed in another post is a totally different computer.

Intel with SATA v. AMD with IDE

Here is a link that might be useful: Micro Star MS7125 motherboard

I do recognize that I have contributed confusion while asking for clarity for myself. The info about Dell was from the FIW site and I assumed (quite erroneously) that it was my computer. The first Belarc was from the time my computer was new. The last Belarc was from yesterday. Yes, I do have some pictures, perhaps 200. They are 1 to 1.5 meg each. The technician has not looked at my computer, I just stopped by and talked with him. How likely that I could buy and install new yard drive myself. I do have an external hard drive (USB 2.0) with some video files, but none on the computer. I disconnected it so that Belarc would not confuse things.

"How likely that I could buy and install new yard drive myself." Another goof on my part. I meant to say "hard drive" and really was asking if I should tackle it myself. Should I? I am an elderly electrician (among other things). Inside the computer housing, the terminology is all foreign to me. I have become pretty good with some computer programs and enjoy the Internet. It is entertaining, instructive, and even profitable.

Its all cord body's and recepts - like plugging in a wall lamp, then bolting it to a wall with a couple or four screws to mount it. You need an extension cord to go from the hard drive to a socket on the motherboard.

Then probably the power supply already has an unused spare power cord connector floating around that plugs into the hard drive. If no spare power outlet you can buy a Y adapter and double up on an existing one.

Here is a link that might be useful: How to install a SATA drive

busdriver-
You need to explore your hard drive a little more. Right-click on "Start," click on "Explore All Users," right-click on various folders in your C: drive, and select "Properties." You can do this repeatedly to see what the rough distribution of space is in your various folders. I have a 6-year old Dell with an 80GB drive, and I have 70GB still available. If you really have the drive almost used up you must have added large numbers of big programs, or have many large music/video/photo files. Is this likely? How do you use your computer?

Report back and we can figure out how to clean this up. And if you need more hard drive space, for under $100 you can get something bigger than your current hard drive which you can plug-in to a USB or firewire port on your computer. That way you don't have to do modifications to your computer. I wouldn't trust a computer tech to work on my computer who didn't tell me this was possible...because it definitely is. You've gotten a lot of good advice already here, but some of the solutions proposed may be more complex than you really need.

Just out of interest. try running Ccleaner with the default settings & see if that clears any space.

Those 200 pictures is nothing, I agree as I said before you need to find out what is happening on your drive that is taking up all that room. I would hate to think your pc has been taken over and someone has loaded a bunch of crud on it but it happens daily to form bot nets.

have you checked your pc for users? are there any new users listed? have you checked your administrative tools in control panel then looked at your even viewer to see if you have any strange activity or messages?

Fix what is wrong now before trying to move on to something else.

Go through add remove programs and see just what is listed that you use and do not use and eliminate any unnecessary programs. Go through your folders as mentioned and check the properties where you can see the size of each.
Determine exactly what is taking up that space. Filling up an 80 gig drive in a short few years if you are not in to heavy video editing or photography or music some thing like that is unusual.
Again do a disc clean up and clear out all the temp files and cookies and junk and run a defrag.

bus driver:

The chances are you are not going to find any big files but if you look in the right places, you WILL find billions of small files. I wouldn't recommend loading anything else on your computer until you have cleaned the hard drive off a bit.

1: clean out your Temporary internet files. In IE that option will be under tools, Internet options. In Firefox it is under Tools, Options, Privacy.

2. Delete other Temporary files. Click Start, Search, All files and folders. Type TEMP in the first search box and click search. Anything in the Temp folders can be deleted safely. Any file with a .tmp extention can be deleted.
A warning though, there may be some files that can not be deleted there as that is where most virus scanning software put their processing logs. Those will have a very recent date on them. Don't worry though, Windows will yell at you and tell you when it can't delete a file.

3. Go to control panel, double click "add or remove programs"
a. Look through the list that populates for programs you no longer use and uninstall them.
b. Look for programs that you don't recognize.. do a online search to determine what they are and if you think you don't need them, uninstall them also.

4. Empty your Recycle Bin.

5. Do a disk defrag. The default windows will work.. there are others that are better. Right click on your start button, click explore. Right click on "local drive (C:)" click on Properties. Click the second tab, Tools, Defrag will be the middle choice.

Let us know what your disk space is after you have done that.

do you by any chance email large files like video or music files? If so if you have your email program set to save every email you send out to a sent folder that is on your computer you could have a very very large sent folder there. I would go into the the email program and see just how it is set up and if you find you do have a sent mail folder look in it and clean it out.

I tried the earlier suggestion of ravencajun and failed to find any large files. I have not yet had opportunity try the suggestions of careless. Yes, I do have large "Sent" files. I know of no way to delete them except one-by-one. OE wants to compact my messages when I close OE, but the last time I granted permission, it deleted many of my most recent inbox messages and I was unable to recover them. So I will not grant that again. Any way to send all "Sent" messages "en masse" to an external hard drive?

I do not use OE and have not looked at it in years so I am not sure how it is set up to delete files. I am sure there is a way to "select all" then go through and un-check the few you want to save.
Once the email has been sent there really is not a lot of reason to save them once the person receives it. Especially if they are from many years past.

I just recently saw a free little program that does exactly what you need, it looks over your drive and gives a graph showing exactly where the large files are located. Now if only my old brain would recall where I saw that and where I could go locate it for you. Anyone else happen to have seen such a program? I thought it was on one of the Gizmo newsletters but I am not finding it. I am not giving up though!

Bus driver did you check your pc for any added user accounts? If someone has gained control of your pc and is using it for storage of files you should be able to find evidence of that in Control Panel accounts and users areas, also go to control panel, administrative tools, click on event viewer and then look on those 3 options there to see if you see anything unusual, especially in the security with log on info.
Have you done a defrag yet? definitely do the disc clean up and the defrag (be sure to turn off your screensaver and any power savers before doing the defrag so it will not stop it)

In Outlook Express can you not go into the Sent folder, go to the top menu and select "Edit" and dropdown list will appear and click on Select all the hit the red X (delete button)

Ok my search has been fruitful and I found the one I was looking for plus a couple of others that were recommended.

This one is the one I had seen which will give you graphs and charts and all kinds of neat stuff to show exactly what is on your hard drive.
Xinorbis
screen shots here:
xinorbis screenshots

Next is treesize free
treesize free

Next is foldersize
foldersize

pick one you like, download it, then you can easily find what is taking up all that drive space.

Easy way to delete Sent email would be to your start button and search/advanced for the file name Sent.dbx / then go to that folder and you should reconize the named .dbx files.
Sent.dbx, Inbox.dbx, Outbox.dbx, etc

You could send any of those to anywhere from that folder and delete the original.... I usually just .zip them when I clean house then sent them to another computers drive for storage.

Might also search for ... Found ... might see some Found005.??? files...
those will most likely be checkdisk clean up files for times that you may have crashed or accidently turned off the power without graciously shutting down. They can grow into a large pile of junk over time on XP after a few problems or if you have lots of power outages.

You might want to study up on windows Select files feature, Try Windows Help. You can select files in mass pretty easy - then send them away or delete/copy whatever.

Compact OE - an article on why compacting might delete files. Microsoft started backing the compact folders up beforehand into the Recycle bin when you compact OE, if your updates are up-to-date it would place and leave a copy of all of em incase of a screwup like you apparently had that one time. Last summer maybe they started doing that method.

CleanMgr has the sageset and sagerun options that allows it to do some extra cleaning,,,

Here is a link that might be useful: CleanMgr /sageset:911

Instead of going to Sent.dbx and doing complicated stuff, mikie, why not do the following?

My suggestion to bus driver is to make up a separate folder - called Unnecessary (or something). Then go through the Sent folder and transfer the unwanted, unnecessary e-mails to this new Unnecessary folder.
E-mails can be transferred in bulk by hitting Shift as you click on an UNhighlighted e-mail. (Hitting Control at the same time as clicking on an UNhighlighted e-mail allows you to pick and chose among the e-mails, so you can highlight several, individually.)

Once the e-mails are moved to this new folder called Unnecessary, the second thing to be done is to click on Local Folders. (It is just above the Inbox in my Outlook Express.)

That produces a list of ALL the folders in Outlook Express and gives the total number of e-mails in each, as well as the number of unread e-mails there are in each folder.

Clicking on a particular folder (therefore highlighting it) and then hitting Delete removes it.

Now how about we start paring down our Sent files, bus driver?
I have over 15,200 e-mails in my Sent file and over 4,500 e-mails in my Inbox. I've been wanting to ask someone if those numbers are why my computer is slow, BTW.

Perhaps I should ask the others if this is a good method. For those of us who are not very sure-fingered.
I did a test - making up a folder and transferring files to it and then deleting the folder. Then deleting the deleted files (en masse) from my Deleted Items folder.

Sorry for being so long-winded, Jane2