The other thing is only C drive is that way in a windows world. Other drives, other partions can be filled much much closer to 100% depending on the setting of the garbage can. Default will make it crash at 90%, make the garbage can smaller and it will be able to be filled more but it's never a good idea cause the computer will crawl looking for spaces to write these files in. Big huge swaths of free space is the way to go. My system 100 gig drive C drive is only 6 gig, Used to be only 4 gig till I tried rendering the picture Wish ( click on my name go check it out) but it crashed at 98% so I made it bigger. Windows only takes up 200 meg here. No cab files I have them sitting on a cd. It flies No drive is even close to being any where near full. Not even close. If you want efficent memory management and efficent hard drive space you're using the wrong operating system I'm afraid. You'd have to use Unix or linux. There extremly efficent. You can still run a entire Unix system hard drives and all on a 486 computer no problem and you only need 8 megs of memory and it still puts windoz to shame in speed and preformance. It don't waste any room period.