Small C drive of Vaio requires a data migration

Q I have a four-year-old Sony Vaio laptop with Windows XP that's running out of C drive space. My C drive has a capacity of 13.97 GB with 463 MB of free space, or 3 percent. But my D drive has a capacity of 36.09 GB with 30.01 GB of free space, or 83 percent. What's going to happen when the C drive fills up? What are my options?

SONIA PETERSON, PLYMOUTH

A As your C drive fills up, your PC will run slowly for lack of storage space to work in. But there is a solution.

Your C and D drives are really different parts of the same physical disk drive, which has been "partitioned" so that they appear to be different drives. For some reason, Sony made the C portion smaller than the D segment, even though Windows and most programs are installed on C. Sony Vaio owners have been complaining about this for years.

One alternative is to move many of your programs, music and photos from the C portion of the drive to the D portion. (I'd leave your antivirus and firewall software on the C portion of the disk. It's just not worth messing with them.)

Another choice would be to re-partition the drive to make the C portion bigger, but that's a technical solution you might want to avoid. See support.microsoft.com/kb/255867/.

For moving software to the D portion of the drive, you'll need to uninstall it from the C portion, then reinstall it to the D segment. As a program prepares to install itself, it shows you the drive to which it will automatically be installed. Change the "C:" portion of that destination to "D:". The new "shortcut" icon that appears in your Start menu or on your PC's desktop will automatically go to the D drive to start the program.

Moving music and photos to the D drive is as easy as dragging the file folders containing them from the C drive to the D drive using Windows Explorer. Because the disk locations of your songs and photos have changed, you will need to import them into the programs that use them.

Note: If you use the iTunes music program, you may want to copy the songs stored in the My Documents folder to a new folder on the D disk. That way you avoid disturbing the My Documents folder, which also is used by some Microsoft programs such as Word. (You can find your iTunes songs in the My Documents folder under the successive headings of My Music, iTunes and iTunes music.)

Once you've copied your iTunes songs to the D portion of the disk, you can erase them from the C portion.