A break in routine today, with a taxi ride for Ann and I to the station, to take the 10.41 train for the two hour journey to London. We parted company at Paddington and with underground and suburban train connections working without delay, arrived at my sister's June's place at one thirty.
Her computer has been ailing for some time, so after lunch I set to work troubleshooting. The 64GB hard drive was almost full, threatening to stop working entirely. On examination the problem turned out to be her photograph collection which was inflated in size by several gigabytes, by duplicated files. How this happened is yet to be determined, how to remove the redundant copies was my challenge.
I started by transferring all files to a back up flash drive. This gave sufficient room for Windows to update. To my surprise the update was a full version of Windows 11. The file transfer to flash drive took more than two hours, and the operating system update another three. In between, I did some food shopping, and searched for a way to safely remove the empty folders and two gigabytes of redundant file duplicates. Then, it was a matter of doing the job manually with the search tool, taking another hour or so. Then some of the pruned photo files could be restored to the computer. The majority of the photos more than four years old will have to stay on the flash drive, as the computer's drive isn't big enough to work properly if it's nearly full. The exception is treasured travel pictures from a decade ago.
To conclude, I activated the file synchronisation process to the cloud storage system, so everything is properly backed up all the time. This took several more hours. It was eleven o'clock be the time I finished. All that was needed then was to repodition the Start mrnu to the old Windows 10 position, so thst no learning to use a new redundant was necessary. All thst needs doing now is to find out how files are getting duplicated and fix that. A job for tomorrow.
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