Low Disk Space Warning: Ignore, Disable, or Obey?

One of the most annoying aspects of Windows is those warning messages that seem to pop up at the most inconvenient times. Although they are designed to warn you when potentially dangerous circumstances arise, some of these warnings are benign and can be closed without taking any actions. And there's the problem... as a result of so many warning messages, and due to a general fear of ANYTHING that pops up on the screen, some users tend to ignore ALL of them. And that can be bad. Sometimes.

One specific warning that desktop users will see on a fairly regular basis as their hard drive fills up is the Low Disk Space warning: "You are running out of disk space on Local Disk [drive]. To free space on this drive by deleting old or unnecessary files, click here." So is this one important? Can you ignore it, disable it, or will doing so put your desktop at risk?

What is the "Low Disk Space Warning"?

Windows created the low disk space warning to alert desktop users when their hard drive is running low on available disk space. The first warning appears when a drive has less than 200 MB of available disk space, the second warning appears when the drive has less than 80 MB of available disk space and the most urgent warning appears when the drive has less than 50 MB of available disk space. As your disk space decreases, the frequency that the low disk space warnings pop-up on your screen increases, and it is because of this that many people decide to disable this warning in their Windows system settings.

Should you ignore these warnings and plow ahead? Here's the test: If you are running out of space on the system drive (almost always the C: drive), then you need to take action right away, or your system performance will begin to suffer, and your ability to recover from problems related to spyware and viruses will be negatively affected. You might even experience a desktop lockup or crash (and potential loss of data) if you take no action.

If the warning refers to some other disk drive, such as the D: or E: drive, then probably you can safely ignore this warning. You still might want to explore those drives to clean up unwanted files or programs, but it won't cause any serious problems, expect perhaps that you'll run out of space to store new files on that drive. If you have a secondary hard drive with less than 200MB of storage, and you understand that's not a problem, then you CAN ignore or even disable this Low Disk Space warning. See below for some tips on how to do that.

As I mentioned earlier, if you have multiple drives, and the problem is not the system (C:) drive, the low space warning is not so important. You can disable the Low Disk Space warning by changing a setting in your system registry. The easiest and safest way to do so is with the tool. After downloading and starting TweakUI, click on Taskbar

and Start Menu, then UNCHECK the box next to "Warn when low on disk space". Click OK to exit from TweakUI, then restart your system to activate the new setting.

If you are comfortable mucking around in the Windows Registry

, then you can make this change without TweakUI. Start the REGEDIT program, then follow these steps:

• Navigate down to HKEY_CURRENT_USER / / Microsoft / Windows / CurrentVersion / Policies / Explorer
• If the NoLowDiskSpaceChecks key is not there, right-click to create a new DWORD worth with that name.
• Double-click on NoLowDiskSpaceChecks, enter 1 for the worth
• Press OK and exit from REGEDIT

Just remember, it's NOT a good idea to turn off the Low Disk Space warning when the problem is on the system drive. Bad Things will happen. Do you have comments or questions about the Low Disk Space warning message? Post your thoughts below...