The computer is fast running out of space in the C: drive. This is causing all sorts of problems, such as printing not working occasionally because of lack of free disk space. The hard drive is partitioned into two drives
‘¢ C: drive - available space: 22 MB of 2047 MB (FAT)
‘¢ D: drive - available space: 2468 MB of 2834 MB (FAT32)
What can I do to boost the available space on the C: drive? I don’t particularly want a D drive and would rather have more space on C. The computer is running Windows 98 with 64 MB of RAM.

I am not surprised you are encountering problems, as most programs need to create temporary files for their purposes and the lack of disk space on your C drive makes it difficult for this to happen. I assume that Windows 98 is installed on C and so are most of the applications. If you are interested, the reason your C drive only has a 2 GB partition is because the maximum partition size supported by FAT is 2 GB, so if you wanted to have a larger drive you would need to convert to FAT32 (for more information see: support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=118335). That aside, there are a few options you have to free-up more space on C. These are detailed below.

Firstly, you could uninstall applications from your C drive and reinstall them on the D drive. For example, if you have Microsoft Office installed (which takes a lot of room) you could uninstall this from C and reinstall on D. You shouldn’t directly copy the program directory across drives, as this may cause problem files and directories which are linked to the current location of that program - you must uninstall and reinstall. However, you may find that you soon run out of space on the D drive. While this isn’t a major concern since D is not the system drive, it could cause space issues to arise in the future.

The second option involves repartitioning your hard drive so that you just have one big partition. To repartition your drive you will need to use a utility called ‘fdisk’. Be aware fdisk will do a destructive repartition meaning all data on the drives being repartitioned will be destroyed. This is probably not a suitable solution for you since, firstly, you don’t want to lose all your data and secondly, fdisk is a rather complicated tool to use. If you are interested in pursuing this option, make sure you backup all the data you wish to keep (as you will lose all the data on your hard drive). If you wish to pursue this option please contact me again for further instructions, as you will need to create a DOS boot disk with the fdisk utility copied across.

Another more workable option to meet your needs is to install a new hard drive in the computer. Hard drives are incredibly cheap at the moment, as you can buy a 40 GB drive for around $100. Once you have installed the drive, uninstall all programs from your C drive and install these onto the new hard drive. This will leave your C partition just as the system partition. You could then use your D drive and new hard drive to store documents and program data.