iTunes filled up my hard drive ..and not with music

Sorry about the two software posts in a row..

I'm doing a bit of housekeeping on my hard drive in preparation for a long-overdue backup, and I noticed that the iTunes folder on my C:\ drive was holding many gigabytes of data.

I've set iTunes to store music on my D:\ drive, but I assumed that at some point in the past iTunes had lost track of that setting and started putting stuff back in the default folder.

It was surprising to discover that the multi-gigabyte folder was holding about 3,400 files called "Temp File 1", "Temp File 2" .. "Temp File 3483". Well, my theory is if a file has "temp" in its name, it's fair game -- so my computer is currently deleting 3.72Gb of temp files.

While it was happening I found this page:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=93043
..which says it's okay to delete them.

It's gonna be nice to have that space back. Check your iTunes folder for temp files!

Resizing Partitions

Yesterday I reorganised my crazy arrangement of hard drive partitions (three 10Gb Windows partitions, and a big Linux partition) into one huuge Windows partition and a spare 10Gb partition for Linux installs or whatever.

Given that my Windows partitions were quite full, I knew I needed to shuffle stuff around. I expected it would take at least the whole weekend, and I'd probably lose some data doing it.

But! Thanks to a brilliant LiveCD release of GParted, I was able to do it in an hour or two (and was really only at the keyboard for 10 or 15 minutes in total).

I used Nero Express to burn the ISO to a CD, but Lifehacker pointed to a freeware ISO recorder if you can't find the cd burning program that originally came with your drive.

GParted booted in about 30 seconds, then I had to select my keyboard, preferred XWindows, video driver, preferred resolution, and some other barely-relevant stuff, but basically it just meant hitting enter five or six times to accept the defaults. Ideally these settings would all be listed on a single "Accept these defaults?" screen, so the 97% of people who want the defaults can get by hitting Enter just once, but , y'know -- it's Linux. Config before usability :)

Aside from that little quibble it was freakin' great. Next time you're re-organising your hard drive, get the latest GParted live CD.