You receive a "The disk is full. Free some space on this drive, or save the document on another drive" error message when you try to save a file in Word 2000

When you try to save a file, the following error message appears: NOTE: Microsoft Office 2000 has built-in functionality that allows you to get more information about difficult-to-troubleshoot alerts or error messages. If you want to enable this functionality for this and other error messages in Microsoft Office 2000, please download the Microsoft Office 2000 Customizable Alerts file from the Microsoft Office Update Web site at the following address: NOTE: If you reached this article by clicking the Web Info button in an error message, you already have Customizable Alerts enabled.

There are too many Word documents open.

Close all other Word documents you may have open in Word. Closing these other Word documents may free sufficient space on your hard disk to save the file.

There are too many Windows applications open.

Close all other Windows applications you may be running. When Windows applications are running, they usually create many temporary files that may use the free disk space on your hard disk. Closing these other Windows applications may free sufficient space on your disk to save the file.

Too many temporary and printer spool files left on the drive.

1. Restart your computer to a command prompt. To do this, do one of the following:
   • In Windows 95, press F8 when you see the "Starting Windows 95" message, and then choose Safe Mode Command Prompt Only from the Startup menu.
     
     -or-
     
     
   • In Windows 98, restart your computer, press and hold down the CTRL key after your computer completes the Power On Self Test (POST), and then choose Safe Mode Command Prompt Only from the Startup menu.
   For additional information about Windows 98 startup, please see the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

   178548  (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/178548/EN-US/ ) No "Starting Windows 98" Message at Startup
2. Type "set" (without quotation marks) and press ENTER. Note the location of the TEMP variable.
3. Change to the folder noted in step 2. For example, if TEMP is set to C:\Windows\Temp, type the following line and then press ENTER:
   CD\Windows\Temp
4. Delete any temporary files in this folder. Temporary files typically have a .TMP extension. To delete these files, type the following line and then press ENTER:
   Del *.tmp
   NOTE: You should not delete these files from within the Windows 95/98 graphical user interface (GUI) because Windows 95/98 or a Windows- based application may be using one of these files.
5. Type the following line and press ENTER to change to the root of your drive:
   CD\
6. Delete other temporary files from the drive by typing the following line and then press ENTER.
   Del ~*.* /s
   IMPORTANT NOTE: Please note the tilde character (~). If you do not use the tilde character, you will delete all of the files on your drive.
7. Type the following line and press ENTER to change to the spool folder:
   CD\Windows\Spool\Printers
8. Delete any printer spool files in this folder. Printer spool files typically have an .SPL extension. To delete these files, type the following line and then press ENTER:
   Del *.spl

Your files may be fragmented or cross-linked.

If the hard disk becomes fragmented or there are cross-linked files on the hard disk, you can encounter problems. To check for these problems, follow these steps:

1. Shut down and restart your computer normally.
2. Click Start, point to Programs, point to Accessories, point to System Tools, and then click ScanDisk. Allow ScanDisk to run until completion.
3. When ScanDisk is finished, click Start, point to Programs, point to Accessories, point to System Tools, and then click Disk Defragmenter. Allow Disk Defragmenter to run to completion.

For additional information about optimizing space in Windows 98, please see the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

You may not have enough free disk space in which to save your file. If this is the case, you need to optimize Windows and free up some disk space. There should be at least 10 megabytes (MB) of free space on the hard disk that contains your Windows temporary folder.

NOTE: The minimum amount of free disk space required may vary with your particular situation.