# dell inspiron 1501 laptop help request



## chronic66 (Feb 19, 2005)

I have the above mentioned laptop. When I click on computer it says that I have 3.2 gb out of 45 gb left on my OS which I guess means operating system. My computer has gotten slower and slower over time. I have a few pictures I have downloaded to it which I don't want to lose. I don't know what I should do to speed up my computer and to save the pictures. I actually don't know if the small amount of os left is a problem or not. Help!


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## Nevada (Sep 9, 2004)

Sounds like you are running out of hard drive space. If that's the case then you'll either need to remove some content or replace the hard drive with a larger drive.

While slowing can certainly be caused by low hard drive space, it is also common for limited memory to be slowing your computer. I would also look into memory usage.


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## Harry Chickpea (Dec 19, 2008)

Hard to imagine a "few" pictures taking up that much space.

I don't know if it relates to you or not, but I was reading a while back how another person had a similar problem and discovered that the browser, in addition to the regular cache, was keeping a HUGE hidden cache of every website they had visited. It couldn't be cleared by normal means and they had to go into the directory and highlight and delete a few hundred files at a time.


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## arabian knight (Dec 19, 2005)

If that laptop is at the base line mark. It only has 256 ram. That is hardly enough to work around in todays memory of things. If running XP with SP3 that takes a whole lot of memory both on the HD and ram. 1 Gig now on ram is pretty much the base number to work with. 256 is way too low, and many things won;t even load with a memory that low. If adding anything to the machine most at the very least want 512 minimum.
And IF that is what that machine is a lot of things are getting put on the HD. And the searching for that takes time.


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