Trotec-PC-Disk-Upgrade

In early Feb, the Trotec started exhibiting OS Stability issues, primarily the Print Spooler crashing.

It was determined that the disk drive was nearly full and that this may have been the cause. After examining the hard drive, the following observations were made:

• The hard drive is a 240GB drive with a single partition, Drive C:, with less than 8GB free.
• The Users profiles made up 160GB of the disk consumption.
• There were 125 Users profiles on the disk, with the largest being 10GB is in size.

After reviewing the disk consumption using a program called TreeeSizeFree, it was found that there is no single culprit of using disk space, but rather that it was common for the users "AppData" directory to contain a couple of GB of data related to applications such as AutoDesk, Microsoft, or some other vendor.

The only long term solution to ensure that this PC remains stable is to store the user's profiles on a separate drive letter than the OS disk

To achieve this, the disk drive was replaced with a new 500GB SSD purchased from Memory Express. A program called "CloneZilla" was used to clone the old drive to the new disk, and then the new disk was configured with a second partition to use as a Data drive for profiles. In addition, the registry was edited and we changed the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList\ProfilesDirectory from "%SystemDrive%\Users" to "D:\Users".

Now any new profiles will be created on the D: drive, but any existing Profile is still on the old drive.

Note that the old 250GB drive is also still in the computer and could be used for archiving and download if needed. It has not been cleaned up and could also be used as a functional backup of the C: if a disaster occurred.