Windows 10: What should I move from C to D drive to speed up PC

Hi,


I have a Dell PC which is about 2 years old. It's decent spec, but has started to slow down considerably over the past couple of months. I was looking around for things to speed it up e.g disc-clean-up, defrag etc and noticed, rather naively, that the C drive which is a HDD is over half full, whereas there's a whole 1TB SSD D drive that is almost completely empty.


I don't remember doing anything at set-up stage to dictate which drive should be used for what, but it seems that the default was just to put everything on C drive, so I'm not making use of the SSD at all. I imagine there are a lot of quick wins to be hand by switching a lot of things over to the D drive, but I don't know what would be best to move there and how best to do this safely.


Most of the stuff on my machine is applications - I have to run a lot of heavy apps for work Slack, Teams, Chrome, Visual Studio, VSCode, SQL Server, Photoshop etc - and web development files. I have a bit of music on there but nothing especially heavy like photos/videos. It's mostly a work machine.


How would I be best to organise the split between C and D to make things faster and how can I move stuff so it doesn't break things?


Many thanks.

:)

 

D drive

Hi,

Based on the details you have provided us, it appears that there might be some corrupted contents on the said partition. We can also consider that this is caused by a virus.

For us to check if a certain virus is hiding your files, kindly follow the steps below:

• Type Command prompt in the search bar.
• Type-in the following command:
  
  attrib -h -r -s /s /d D:\*.*
• Press Enter to execute the command.

If you think that there is nothing important stored in it, then we suggest that you reformat your D drive so that you can use the free space for important files.

You can follow the steps below to start with the process:

• Click on the File Explorer.
• Select This PC.
• Right-click on your D drive, then click on Format.
• Follow the on-screen process to finish formatting the partition.

Let us know how it goes so that we can further assist you.

 

Installing to a second Drive. D: or external (Non Boot up Drives)

Hi,



Thank you for writing to Microsoft Community Forums.



We understand your concern as you are looking for an option to move the game location from the C drive to the Drive D, which is an external drive.



In this scenario, we would suggest you to perform these steps and check if that resolves your issue on both laptop and Desktop.

1. As usual install the game on the PC’s in
   C Drive.
   
2. Insert the external
   D drive to the PC.
   
3. Press Windows + I key from the keyboard to launch
   Settings.
   
4. Select Apps and click on
   Apps & features from the left pane.
   
5. Search for the installed game from the list on the right pane.
   
6. Single click on the game and select
   Move.
   
7. Select the D drive under
   Choose a drive where you want to move the game.
   
8. Restart the PC with the external drive connected and then launch the game.

We await your response.



Aditya Roy

Microsoft Community – Moderator

 

No C: but D: drive has all the data

Hi Austin,

To help you with your concern regarding the data on the drive C:, you're seeing the drive "C:" as the drive "D:" because you're booting your computer outside Windows. When booting your computer outside Windows, the system is reading the recovery partition
as drive C: and the data in the drive C: \ are listed on the drive D: \. Try to boot your computer and try to check again the data in the drive C: \ and see if the data are listed.

Regards.