This reminds me of the “Is there a problem here?” portion of Ben Simo’s QualityFrog blog. Seems like a good candidate for that. http://blog.isthereaproblemhere.com/

-adam

That is the information that needs to be displayed, and it is available because the program knows that it is not enough, therefore it could tell the user how much is needed. I would also suggest that there be a link that would go to a page explaining why the free space was required, as in these days especially, it cannot be expected that a majority of users would look up that information up.

I believe that it is essential that almost all error messages should indicate how the problem can be resolved.

–Steve

This *is* a problem – I’d say, it’s a bug: Built-in Defrag has a minimum of around 14 % free space, in order to start up. (You’re currently at 13 %). This value is perhaps a leftover from earlier days, when harddrives where significantly smaller ? I don’t know if that’s true, but 8 Gb spare room on the HD is a lot. And thus I would see this as a feature which originally saved the program from failure, but now has been outdated by the hardware development rate.

But mind you, this limitation comes from the built-in defrag-program (and you might read from the comment that I’ve been painfully hit by this also .

Another problem is, that this limitation is not understood by OneCare. It ought to suggest you make room on the HD – so that it could defrag it. That it doesn’t support my hunch that this is an outdated, arbitrary, unpublished limitation.

-adam