Todays old man whinge is about disk space and why we never have enough. Even though I've just bought 2.5Tb of discs recently, none of these are for my laptop, upon which I was planning to upgrade XP to Vista. Except I can't, of course, as the upgrade needs 7Gb free on the upgrade partition and I only have 2.5Gb free. I have 10GB free on another partition and a 15Gb empty partition, but neither of these can be used as temporary space for the upgrade. Why not? It's not just Vista that this applies to, but nearly all installations, which don't let you specify where temporary files can go. I've noticed this in other software too, such as defrag programs, which won't defrag your drive because it has too little space, even though you've huge amounts of free space on other drives which it could use during the defrag.
There may be some complex reasons for this, but as a user it's frustrating. I'm now faced with having to either performa a clean install, meaning I'll have to re-install all of the applications, or to get a disk partition manager and re-jig the partitions. Neither are perfect solutions, partly because I'm lazy and really don't want the hassle, but I know I'm going to have to pick one of the options.