Hard drive or computer disc?

[Yorkshisre lass]

Hello

I'm a newbie and this is my first post and I hope someone can can advise me.

I have about 500 MBs worth of photos and scrapbooking stash on my computer's hard drive and I'm worrying whether this is too much and is likely to seriously slow down or crash my computer. Just for safety I have backed it up onto CDs.

I've just downloaded Picasa 2 to keep my stuff organised but this will only work if I'm accessing photos and things from the HD and not from CDs.

I have a high(ish) spec computer Pentium 4 with 60 gig of HD and 2.53 GHz, 512 MB of RAM.

Can someone help :O)

[LadynRed]

Using your disk storage isn't going to slow down your PC or make it crash. Things that will slow down your pc would be things like - too many files in your Temp directory or severely fragmented files. Other things like spyware, malware and viruses can slow down your pc AND make it crash.

500 MB on a 60 GIG hard drive is not a lot, its a drop in the bucket. However, it's still a good idea to keep those files backed up. You can buy yourself an external hard drive that's bigger than the one in your PC for around $100. I recently bought a 200GIG hard drive for $99... got lucky and caught a sale at CompUSA.

For better performance on your existing PC, double your RAM, 512MB these days is bare minimum and memory is still fairly reasonably priced.

[Yorkshisre lass]

Using your disk storage isn't going to slow down your PC or make it crash. Things that will slow down your pc would be things like - too many files in your Temp directory or severely fragmented files. Other things like spyware, malware and viruses can slow down your pc AND make it crash.

500 MB on a 60 GIG hard drive is not a lot, its a drop in the bucket. However, it's still a good idea to keep those files backed up. You can buy yourself an external hard drive that's bigger than the one in your PC for around $100. I recently bought a 200GIG hard drive for $99... got lucky and caught a sale at CompUSA.

For better performance on your existing PC, double your RAM, 512MB these days is bare minimum and memory is still fairly reasonably priced.
Hi Ladynred

Thank you so much for your quick response.

I do tend to pamper my computer quite a bit, giving it regular defrags, updating my virus software every day and doing a virus scan every week, so (touch wood) it usually does reward me by 'flying like the wind'.

I just didn't understand about how much 'stuff' would be too much when stored on the disc. I see now that my rule of trying to keep files down to a max of 100 MB was quite a joke and I can now start enjoying my photos and 'freebies' and get cracking on making digital scrapbook pages.

The first thing I will invest in is more RAM though.

Once again many thanks

[LadynRed]

Well, with the huge hard drives these days, you'd have to get a LOT more on your disk than 500MB to notice much of a slow down, if any. I've got GIGS of graphics files, including scrapping kits, on my pc and it still flies. If you keep it defragged, that's one of the best things you can do for disk performance.