Does low disk space make my Macbook Pro act weird?

Hi! I have an early 2011 15" MBP with a 750gb hard disk space. Just the other day, while I was using photoshop with my laptop, the screen went off so I had to reset it. My laptop acted weird after: doing a screen split (the right part goes to the left and vice versa), one time it had weird pixels that were scattered all over, recently, a blue striped screen. All of this froze my laptop by the way. And all of this happened after a few minutes of usage. And I noticed if I use photoshop, it would only take a little amount of time before it would act weird again compared to when I don't. All the times caused me to reset my laptop by holding the power button.
Yesterday, it wouldn't boot past the gray screen after resetting about five times. But after it turned off by itself, I tried turning it on again and it booted normally. And I could use it normally again, but with extra care (using it beside an electric fan, checking the temperature with iStat pro).
I tried the extended Apple Hardware Test but it told me no trouble was found.
Another thing was, everytime my laptop froze and did the weird screen thingy, my laptop was hot.
I tried to use it again yesterday to just surf the web, and after some minutes it was still functioning. But I remember one time I was only surfing the web, it did the split screen and froze after almost an hour or so.
Also, my laptop heats up quickly compared before. And can stand being hot for a long time until now.
I haven't used any heavy applications besides photoshop to test my laptop's weird behavior by the way.
So I guess it's because of the laptop's heat. Because I can only use it for a very short time when using photoshop but I can use my laptop for a longer time when only surfing the web.
I also noticed that if I was forced to reset my laptop and turn it on again, it would boot longer than normal. But if I was able to shut it down properly and turn it on again, it would boot normally.
And, just a while ago, I remembered my laptop's disk space was only 14gb from 750gb (downloaded a lot of series since I bought my laptop). So maybe what's causing the heat was the low disk space. Just a guess. So is it possible that my laptop is behaving weird because of the low disk space?

The problem is back. But this time, it only happened when I used photoshop or played a 1080p video. I was using my laptop for almost 3 hours when i decided to use photoshop. It froze as soon as it started and made my screen display weird pixels. I restarted and tried to open photoshop again and this time, it froze. I did it the third time and after using PS for a minute, it did the split screen. After restarting yet again, I tried to play a 1080p video to just test my laptop. It froze as soon as VLC started. But when i only surf the web (which is the only thing I did before using PS), everything goes well. So I guess it really is the GPU and not the logic board or some other parts. I've decided to just have my laptop checked.

Similar Messages

How can i clean up my disk space on my MacBook Pro

how can i clean up my disk space on my MacBook Pro something like a disk cleanup on a pc?

Those things you did on your PC you need not worry about on your Mac. Most is done behind the scenes.
Kappy's Personal Suggestions About OS X Maintenance
For disk repairs use Disk Utility. For situations DU cannot handle the best third-party utilities are: Disk Warrior; DW only fixes problems with the disk directory, but most disk problems are caused by directory corruption; Disk Warrior 4.x is now Intel Mac compatible. Drive Genius provides additional tools not found in Disk Warrior. Versions 1.5.1 and later are Intel Mac compatible.
OS X performs certain maintenance functions that are scheduled to occur on a daily, weekly, or monthly period. The maintenance scripts run in the early AM only if the computer is turned on 24/7 (no sleep.)
If you are using a pre-Leopard version of OS X, then an excellent solution is to download and install a shareware utility such as Macaroni, JAW PseudoAnacron, or Anacron that will automate the maintenance activity regardless of whether the computer is turned off or asleep. Dependence upon third-party utilities to run the periodic maintenance scripts was significantly reduced since Tiger. (These utilities have limited or no functionality with Snow Leopard, Lion, or Mountain Lion and should not be installed.)
OS X automatically defragments files less than 20 MBs in size, so unless you have a disk full of very large files there's little need for defragmenting the hard drive. As for virus protection there are few if any such animals affecting OS X. You can protect the computer easily using the freeware Open Source virus protection software ClamXAV. Personally I would avoid most commercial anti-virus software because of their potential for causing problems. For more about malware see Macintosh Virus Guide.
I would also recommend downloading a utility such as TinkerTool System, OnyX 2.4.3, or Cocktail 5.1.1 that you can use for periodic maintenance such as removing old log files and archives, clearing caches, etc.
For emergency repairs install the freeware utility Applejack. If you cannot start up in OS X, you may be able to start in single-user mode from which you can run Applejack to do a whole set of repair and maintenance routines from the command line. Note that AppleJack 1.5 is required for Leopard. AppleJack 1.6 is compatible with Snow Leopard. (There is no confirmation that this version also works with Lion or later.)
When you install any new system software or updates be sure to repair the hard drive and permissions beforehand. I also recommend booting into safe mode before doing system software updates.
Get an external Firewire drive at least equal in size to the internal hard drive and make (and maintain) a bootable clone/backup. You can make a bootable clone using the Restore option of Disk Utility. You can also make and maintain clones with good backup software. My personal recommendations are (order is not significant):
1. Carbon Copy Cloner.
2. Data Backup
3. Deja Vu
4. SuperDuper!
5. SyncTwoFolders
6. Synk Pro
7. Synk Standard
8. Tri-Backup
Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQs on maintenance, optimization, virus protection, and backup and restore.
Always have a current backup before performing any system updates or upgrades.
Additional suggestions will be found in:
      1. Mac Maintenance Quick Assist,
      2. Mac OS X speed FAQ,
      3. Speeding up Macs,
      4. Macintosh OS X Routine Maintenance,
      5. Essential Mac Maintenance: Get set up,
      6. Essential Mac Maintenance: Rev up your routines,
      7. Maintaining OS X,
      8. Five Mac maintenance myths,
      9. How to Speed up Macs, and
    10. Myths of required versus not required maintenance for Mac OS X.
Referenced software can be found at CNet Downloads or MacUpdate.
Be sure you have an adequate amount of RAM installed for the number of applications you run concurrently. Be sure you leave a minimum of 10% of the hard drive's capacity or 20 GBs, whichever is greater, as free space.

HT201364 what is the best way to open up disk space on my macbook pro

WHAT IS THE BEST WAY TO FREE DISK SPACE ON MY MACBOOK PRO, I NEED SPACE TO DOWNLOAD YOSEMITE

OmniDiskSweeper (free download)
<http://www.omnigroup.com/more>
<http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/7402/omnidisksweeper>
DO NOT delete files in your Home Folder -> Library tree as there are things like your iPhone backups, your email messages, your application preferences, etc...
DO NOT delete files outside your home folder, as you may end up deleting something essential to Mac OS X, and turn your Mac into an expensive “Door Stop”.
I will point out that you will find some very large files in private -> var -> vm (these are the Mac OS X virtual memory paging files (swapfiles) and where Mac OS X stores the copy of RAM when your Mac is put to sleep). The swapfiles get deleted on reboot, and the sleep image is just going to be created again when you put your Mac to sleep.
If you think you have found something to delete outside your home folder, it would be best to ask first before deleting. There are many examples of people deleting files outside their home folder, or renaming files, or changing the ownership or permissions of files, and then their Mac stops running. Do not be one of those people. Ask first.
PS. Please do not use ALL CAPS for your entire messages. In the world of text messages, forums, etc... ALL CAPS is shouting, and we haven't done anything that annoying yet

I need more hard disk space on my macbook pro

I need more hard disk space on my macbook pro

Since you have 160 GB listed as backups let's assume these are Time Machine snapshots. Time Machine will use up to 80% of the disk space for local snapshots. This is not an issue. As you fill your disk it willl remove snapshots to maintain at least 20% free. If you wish to free this space simply plug in a Time Machine backup disk and run a backup.
You might also notice that the Storage display in About This Mac will show the backup space as used while a Get Info on the sytem drive will show that space free. So at this point, if it is Time Machine snapshots that are taking the space, you should see 160 GB more free space from the Get Info query compared to the Storage display.
Summary: If this space is Time Machine snapshots then don't worry about it. It will take care of itself.
I do not recommend leaving Time Machine in the off state. It is a valuable backup tool that can save your bacon when you accidentally delete or modify a file or if your system crashes. The snapshots are backups at recent times that you can go back to should you delete or currupt a file, even if you do not have a Time Machine disk plugged in.
Time Machine FAQ, What are Local Snapshots: http://pondini.org/TM/30.html

No free disk space on my Macbook Pro- why?

Hi, i'm having a lot of trouble trying to free up disk space on my mac!
I have 120g HD with 8G RAM. I'm using OS X 10.8.5
Disk Usage on Activity Monitor says i have used 110.29G and only 10.18G free, which i find ridiculous! I have backed up my computer with an external hard drive, have deleted all of my unused apps (like Photoshop and some Microsoft office programs), movies, work, and most of my photos to free up space, leaving only photos, music and a few small word files here and there on my computer, yet i still have no space!
'About this mac' shows 62.97G of 'other' storage being used.. what could this be??
I have used apps like Trash It, CleanGenius and AppTrap to free space, but nothing seems to be working! The app CleanGenius enabled me to get rid of duplicate files and i managed to get 17GB free, but after i restarted my computer it went back down to 10GB! Why?!
On Disk Utility i have used the verify disk permissions, repair disk permissions, and verify disk functions but to be honest i don't think it made any difference.
I have used terminal to free cache's and clear the sleep-mode file that the mac makes.
Any suggestions would be fantastic as i don't understand why i still don't have any space!! I've been trying for weeks! Fr
Please help!!

‘Other’:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT6047

MacBook Pro acting weird at startup

Hi,
First of all thank you for reading this, it's quite a long story. And sorry for any grammatical mistakes, I'm Dutch.
Summary
My MBP suddenly has been acting really weird: kernel_task eating 150-200% of the CPU which caused a super slow MBP, power button not working well, and MBP shutdown after ten minutes without touching it and with the battery on 90%. I did a clean install of OS X Lion, some PRAM and SMC resets and removed the MacBookPro7_1.plist file from the system library. The kernel_task high CPU problem is now fixed. But the power button is still not working: most of the time my MBP shuts down three seconds after I push the power button in a first attempt. In the second attempt I hold it for like five seconds and this works. Sometimes it works fine on the first attempt. Restarting the MBP from the desktop works fine. I'm also worried about the random shutdown. What could probably cause the problem with the power button and the MBP shutting down when I don't touch it, and is there a way to fix this myself? I'm not really into tech, so please keep your answer simple.
My MacBook Pro "13 (mid 2010) with OS X Lion has always been a charm since I bought it. I've never had any problems with my MBP until now. Two weeks ago I was going on a holiday and had to check a few things on my MBP in a hurry right before I was leaving. I'm afraid I forgot to turn off my MBP before I went on my holiday, but I can't remember this exactly. When I came back after a week, my MBP started acting weird at startup and then became really slow. The kernel_task was eating my CPU with 200% and I've tried many things to fix the MBP myself but it still isn't working well. I hope you can help me with this.
This is what happened:
1. When I push the power button to start my MBP, the first time it shuts down three seconds after I push the button. After the first attempt I hold the power button for five seconds, and my MBP turns on the right way. After all the fixes I've done this is still an issue.
2. When I finally got my MBP started the first time after my holiday, it was really really really slow. I later found out that the cause was the kernel_task eating my CPU. It was using 150-200% with no applications running.
3. The MBP was acting normally (not slow) in safe mode, but in safe mode I couldn't open some sites in Google Chrome, like Facebook and Google Maps. So this didn't work either (and was not the solution to my problem).
4. I did some things with PRAM and SMC reset but this didn't work.
5. A clean install was already on my mind for weeks, so I decided that this was the right moment. After I did a manual backup (not with Time Machine) I restarted my MBP holding some buttons to startup the OS X Utilities screen. I first erased my Macintosh HD and then I wanted to install Mavericks because that was the only option from the menu. It took me five hours and at the end it came up with a 'can't download Mavericks, try again' screen. The MBP wasn't starting up anymore because OS X Lion was already erased.
6. So I became annoyed and decided to use my original Snow Leopard dvd which came with my MBP. Installing Snow Leopard took me two days!!!!!!!
7. When I finally got Snow Leopard installed, it still was really really slow and the kernel_task was messing up my CPU again.
8. After some hours of searching on the internet, I read the following thing: fixing the kernel_task problem was easy by removing a file from the system library (http://www.rdoxenham.com/?p=259). Of course I've researched this solution because I'm not a fan of changing things in the system. But I decided to give this a try and it worked! Like a charm!
9. I still was on Snow Leopard and decided to upgrade to Lion again, because I did know for sure that my MBP could handle Lion and I wasn't sure with Mavericks. So I first downloaded Lion from the App Store and then opened the installation program. This took me one day again, probably because the file from the system library was put back with the installation of Lion...
10. When I finally got Lion running, the kernel_task was using a high CPU% again so I removed the file from the system library again and restarted my MBP. This worked.
11. I'm working on Lion for a day now and I've installed some applications (Adobe CS5 Master Collection, Office for Mac, updated my 17.000 mails in Mac Mail, and installed some browsers). It's working fine and the kernel_task is at 1-10%. The issue with the power button is still there but sometimes it works fine at the first attempt. Yesterday my MBP suddenly shut down when I didn't touch it for like ten minutes. The battery was still on 90%. Maybe this was caused by the fact that my MBP was running for four days non stop because of the OS X installations, and it was a hot day yesterday.
So this is what I've done so far in this order:
1. First of all I did a manual backup on my external HDD. Not with Time Machine.
2. I tried to restart my MBP multiple times. Restarting from the desktop worked well, but shutting it down and than turning it on with the power button didn't work well.
3. I did PRAM and SMC resets multiple times.
4. I decided to do a clean install and erased my Macintosh HD from the OS X Utilities screen at startup.
5. Then I wanted to upgrade from Lion to Mavericks but Mavericks couldn't be downloaded.
6. I've installed Snow Leopard from the original dvd, this took me two days.
7. I've followed the instructions from http://www.rdoxenham.com/?p=259 (remove the file MacBookPro7_1.plist from the system library) and this worked for my MBP.
8. Because my MBP was working fine again, I decided to upgrade to Lion. This took me one day.
9. My MBP was really slow again: Lion put the MacBookPro7_1.plist back in the system library so I removed it again. This worked.
10. The problem with the power button still holds so I did a SMC reset again. Didn't work. My MBP also shut down yesterday when I didn't touch it for like ten minutes. I hope this was caused by the fact that the MBP was running for four days non stop, and it was a hot day so maybe it was overheated.
So everything is working fine again, but the power button still isn't. Most of the time my MBP shuts down three seconds after I push the power button. In the second attempt I hold it for like five seconds and this works. Restarting the MBP from the desktop works fine, and the kernel_task is now using 1-10%. I'm also worried about my MBP suddenly shutting down. Is there a way to fix this myself?
Thank you!
Regards,
TokkieTor

TokkieTor,
This is the full error message I got from the test:
4SNS/1/40000000: IP0R-9:166
I read that those letters (IP0R) stand for different errors in the hardware, in my case it's something with the Power Bus according to this website: http://www.cnet.com/news/how-to-invoke-and-interpret-the-apple-hardware-tests/.
Again, I'm really not into tech so what is a Power Bus and should I be worried?
what you have is a problem with a sensor which monitors power bus current. The power bus is the main pathway along which electricity travels in your MacBook Pro. If the sensor isn’t individually repairable, then you could have reason to worry — if they tell you that a logic board replacement would be needed, then that could cost hundreds of euros. (One would hope that replacing a sensor would not require a logic board replacement, but only hardware experts can say for sure.)
I think that posts here are only editable for ten or fifteen minutes after replying.

Disk space problems on Macbook Pro

Hi
I have started getting messages that the startup disk is full and that I should delete files etc. I have deleted some photos, emptied i photo trash and the regular trash. This has got me back to 694 MB available on the HDD. When I loom at the HDD and list the properties by file size, it says that i photo is using 111.9 GB.
When I open i photo and click on events or photo's, it says that it has 8953 photo's and is using 36.3Gb of space. I shoot in Raw, so my average file size is around 25MB. I don't understand why it is giving this different figure. Any ideas how I can free off some significant space?
I upgraded to Snow Leopard 10.6.3 this week to work with my new GoPro camera software, could this have any bearing on things? I have attempted to download some video to Cineform studio to edit some clips, but due to the lack of space it obviously wouldn't have it.
Any advice gratefully received. Thanks.

"...This has got me back to 694 MB available on the HDD...."
You should try to have at least 15% free hard drive space. 694 MB is what percent of your total hard drive capacity?

Cannot Upgrade to ios 5 because of low disk space

Hi!
I can't upgrade to iOS 5 on my iPhone or iPad because of low disk space on my MacBook Pro. I've got my iTunes Library on an external drive so I assumed that the backup of my iPad and iPhone would occur on that device. Is there a way to modify the settings for the upgrade that will backup my iPad and iPhone to my external drive instead of my MacBook Pro so that I can install iOS 5? My iPad has approximately 35 GB of items that need to be backed up and the solid state drive on my Mac Book Pro has only about 8 Gb left (out of my tiny 128 Gb drive).
Thanks for any assistance!

Thanks to info about OmniDiskSweeper on another thread, I was able to free up sufficient space on my Mac Book Pro to allow me to do the upgrade successfully for both my iPad 2 and my iPhone 3GS. However, it would be nice if Apple offered an option to backup these devices to an external disk rather than a default location.

Need help with Low disk space issue and blue screen

Hi Everyone, just seen a message stating a low disk space on my Mac pro bought last November and tried plugging in an external hard drive to remove some pictures to free up some space but it seems that the computer did not have enough space left to start up and run the hard drive. I then tried to restart and ended up with a blue screen and have no knowledge now how to fix this problem. I phoned support but they say I have no technical support left but do have warranty and I would need to either try with the community here or take the unit to an apple store for an appointment. The store is an 1 and 1/2 from me and I really want o see if there is another fix that could allow me to start again then remove some files and then add external drive to remove more. I was blown away at the low amount of storage.....looked for the icloud option last night to upload there as i was told about this by a UK client of mine and now see it is not up and running. Any advice or help by the communtiy would be greatly appreciated as this is my business and travelling laptop. Cheers, Dean <")))><

Great to hear Dean, thanks!
Further notes: OSX needs about 15% or 10GB Free space minimum, but will run mucch faster/safer with 30-40% or 50GB of Free Space... Free Space is no longer ours to use.
Another tool to help clear up assorted things is Applejack...
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/15667/applejack
After installing, reboot holding down CMD+s, (+s), then when the DOS like prompt shows, type in...
applejack AUTO
Then let it do all 6 of it's things.
At least it'll eliminate some questions if it doesn't fix it.
The 6 things it does are...
Correct any Disk problems.
Repair Permissions.
Clear out Cache Files.
Repair/check several plist files.
Dump the VM files for a fresh start.
Trash old Log files.
First reboot will be slower, sometimes 2 or 3 restarts will be required for full benefit... my guess is files relying upon other files relying upon other files! :-)
Disconnect the USB cable from any Uninterruptible Power Supply so the system doesn't shut down in the middle of the process.

Blue sceen appeared after low disk space warning

Hi Everyone, just seen a message stating a low disk space on my Mac pro bought last November and tried plugging in an external hard drive to remove some pictures to free up some space but it seems that the computer did not have enough space left to start up and run the hard drive. I then tried to restart and ended up with a blue screen and have no knowledge now how to fix this problem. I phoned support but they say I have no technical support left but do have warranty and I would need to either try with the community here or take the unit to an apple store for an appointment. The store is an 1 and 1/2 from me and I really want o see if there is another fix that could allow me to start again then remove some files and then add external drive to remove more. I was blown away at the low amount of storage.....looked for the icloud option last night to upload there as i was told about this by a UK client of mine and now see it is not up and running. Any advice or help by the communtiy would be greatly appreciated as this is my business and travelling laptop. Cheers, Dean <")))><

Hi Dean,
You may be able to access it via FireWire Target Disk Mode: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=58583
If so, move and delete enough so you have at least 15% free space on the MBP's HD. After that, run Repair Disk:
First check the S.M.A.R.T. status on your HD: Boot from install disc (insert disc > restart > immediately hold down the c key and keep holding it until you see “Preparing Installation”) > at first screen select the language and click Continue > click on theUtilities Menu in the menu bar > select Disk Utility > select your HD in the panel on the left side (the name of the HD’s manufacturer and the model number, usually the top item in the list) > look at the bottom of the main window next to S.M.A.R.T. status and see if it says “Verified” (good) or something more ominous like “Failing.”
If S.M.A.R.T. status is "Verified," run Repair Disk > click Repair Disk at bottom of main window. Run this at least twice, and keep running it until it says “appears ok” twice in a row. If that doesn’t happen, you may need a stronger utility (such as DriveGenius, TechToolPro, DiskWarrior) or if the directory is damaged beyond repair, you may need to reinstall the OS, or you may have a damaged HD (repair utilities can only repair the directory structure, not the HD itself). When this is finished, quit Disk Utility, quit the installer, and restart. Once booted normally, go to Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility and run Repair Permissions.

Finder fails to open when starting up macbook pro due to low disk space (possibly)

Dear forum,
I have a Macbook Pro (13") running snow leopard and have a partitioned hard drive (half OS X and half Windows 7). This morning I was using the Mac side and was running low on disk space (very low) so I was moving desktop files into folders to free up some space. I restarted the computer to see what the free space was but the computer stopped/froze at the desktop image (no folders or dock appeared. I restarted the computer many times but the finder never opens and all I see is the desktop wallpaper. I donnected usb drives and put in dvds but the finder never appears so I cn do nothing but shut down and start up.
I ran Disk Utility but it found no problems with the disk. I do not have a backup of the important file forlders on my drive and due to low disk space I am worried to reinstall and archive the OS since there may not be enough disk space to archive (only about 220 mb free on the apple side when I am in windows using bootcamp).
Does anyone know what happeded to my machine? Is there such low disk space that finder had an issue? I have started on such low memory before.
What does Archive actually do when reinstalling OS X? Does it make a copy of the HD files and folders or does it simply reinstall the operating system piece by piece while protecting the files and folders that I wish to save?
Thanks for all your help and sorry for the length of the writing (I wanted you to understand all before replying).

Solved
By chance I got itunes to pop up (running hands over keys blindly) and with it the apple menu icon so I had access to my recently used items and so I could delete images from iphoto and thus bring the free disk space up above zero and then the dock/folders and finder came back....I have just backed up my important files......feeling better now
Any advice on how to more quickly handle this type of issue next time?
Thanks.

I recently moved my iTunes folder to a portable drive to make space on my macbook pro with Mavericks, and now the space is still taken up by back ups? any help to clear this space up would be greatly appreciated! Oh btw, macbook pro backs up to time caps

Im trying to free up some of the space on my macbook pro, its been filled up with itunes hd movies, so i purchased a 1TB portable hard drive and moved all my itunes files to it to free up some space. When i went into about this mac and checked storage, it says i have over 400GB's of back ups. I back up everyday through time machine to my time capsule, not sure what to do, any help is much appreciated! thanks

When Time Machine backs up a portable Mac, some of the free space will be used to make local snapshots, which are backup copies of recently deleted files. The space occupied by local snapshots is reported as available by the Finder, and should be considered as such. In the Storage display of System Information, local snapshots are shown as Backups. The snapshots are automatically deleted when they expire or when free space falls below a certain level. You ordinarily don't need to, and should not, delete local snapshots yourself, nor should you disable them or Time Machine.

Can I make a disk image of my macbook pro for backup?

Can I make a disk image of my macbook pro for backup? I'm using Lion, have 8 g memory and 500 HDD.

Clone Lion using Restore Option of Disk Utility
Boot to the Recovery HD:
Restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the COMMAND and R keys until the menu screen appears. Alternatively, restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the OPTION key until the boot manager screen appears. Select the Recovery HD and click on the downward pointing arrow button.
Select Disk Utility from the main menu then press the Continue button.
Select the destination volume from the left side list.
Click on the Restore tab in the DU main window.
Check the box labeled Erase destination.
Select the destination volume from the left side list and drag it to the Destination entry field.
Select the source volume from the left side list and drag it to the Source entry field.
Double-check you got it right, then click on the Restore button.
Destination means the external backup drive. Source means the internal startup drive.
DU will also clone the Recovery HD partition automatically at the end of the process.

When does a mountet network drive goes from green to red in colour due to low disk space?

Hi,
I have a number of network shares on MS 2008 R2 servers, that my users have mountet on their Win7 PC's.
What is the limit for when a mountet network drive goes from green to red on the users PC, due to
low disk space.
My guess is below 10% but I can not
find any confirmation of this
anywhere online
Kind regards,
Carl-Marius

Hi,
As you mentioned, the red bar will display when the drive has less than 10% space.
Best Regards,
Andy Qi
TechNet Subscriber Support
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Qosmio X500 Folder migration utility and low disk space drice C

This may be a longish post as I try to explain my problem... please forgive.
I've had my X500 for just over three months now.
It took a little while before the folder migration utility woke up I didn't know it was there after I'd done a limited copy of folders across from my old Qosmio F20. After it had woken up and I'd been able to transfer folders/files across it cleared a lot of room from the 'tiny' - I feel, 60 Gb SSD C drive.
I keep getting a message coming up sometimes, when I boot up, that the folder migration utility has a setting for me. If I open the utility it shows no folders in the 'C' drive area and folders already transfered [from first using it] in the right hand side for the 'D' drive. Text in the bottom of the utility says something like "if you have done some manual transfers then it can't do anything"... something along those lines - sorry for not being clear on that.
I've recently installed some other programs and have endeavoured each time to do a custom install to the D drive to program files [x86] folder. However, drive C is now showing low disk space at 5.58 of 59.2 Gb.
Checking the folders copies??? I thought for the programs I installed I find lots of folders/files in those program folders so taking up a lot of space.
What is the best way to free up space on drive 'C' please?
Should I manually copy the data contained in the folders [not just a 'name' ... ie; AVID... folder but possibly also in the drive C Program files [x86] folder] to the same named folders on drive D?
If I did, would the programs work properly or would there be problems in the program being located?
When the utility first activated [by itself] I thought "Great... transfer of all my old data to the X500 will be easy" but it doesn't seem to be the case. I was expecting that any new programs installed would be automatically copied to drive D. I'm getting somewhat paranoid about the low disk space on drive C.
Help would be appreciated.

Thanks for coming forward PauPau.
Firstly, when I got the x500 I had lots of documents etc., I wanted to transfer over so I used the Win7 Transfer program to make the back up/transfer images. In doing the transfer across [after the copies of] the X500 gave an error warning that the C: drive had insufficient space to do the full copies. At this time/stage I was not aware that the X500 had a folder migration utility. What ever made it 'wake up' and make itself known I have no idea but I used it when it did. My first problem was probably in using the Win7 file transfer - for getting files/folders across from the old computer to the x500!
I ended up doing a factory reset about three times before this utility made it self known. I found NOTHING in ant documentation about the X500 about this utility and how to make use of it when I bought the laptop. Not sure if you are aware of the make up of the X500 having 2 hard drives; a 'C:' drive of 65Gb SSD and a SATA 'D:' drive of 650GB. If you do then my apologies if that comes over in any 'bad' way. The D: drive is NOT a partition of 1 installed hard drive as your reply would seem to suggest you are thinking.
The migration folder utility, when used first time, copied/transfered folders across - even program folders such as Program files [x86] - and left 'similar' named folders on the C: drive. At that time I then thought that any future installs of programs would be put in the D: drive. Only when watching the first time for a new program install did I see it going to the C: Program and Program files [x86] folders instead of those in the D: drive. I then had to uninstall and do a custom install to direct to the D: drive. However... some data appears that it can NOT be directed from the install disk to the D: drive and still goes to the C: drive - HENCE the issue I am having with the small amount of remaining free space on the C: drive.
I accept what you say in reply to my question about the best way to free up space but, based on as explained above, should I have to do a re-install of any program I try to run after being moved to the same named corresponding folder on the separate D: drive [if that is what I have to do] I think the install disk will still do an automatic install of these to the C: drive as at that stage there seems no way of stopping it. Although given the option in a custom install to change the 'drive' to install to such as the D: some data is still going to C: and I'll be in the same predicament that I am now.
If that's the case then maybe this is something that TOSHIBA should be looking in to solving if they are going to produce laptops with two hard drives - - - even if one [the C: drive] is of the SSD make to speed thing up.
I DO appreciate your input. MAybe I didn't explain properly first time... and maybe I haven't this time - in which case I apologies.
Are there no other X500 users with the same issue?
Thanks. I may just have to give it a go and transfer these data files/folders manually to the D: and see what happens if no one here can guide as to stop any hair pulling frustrations if it goes wrong.

Does low disk space make my Macbook Pro act weird?

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