SCRATCH DISK FULL HELP PLEASE

You must get a laptop with enough memory or add an external drive

No shortcut here. You need to clear out as much space as possible on your drive. The scratch disk is not a setting - it's real, physical disk space. For very basic Photoshop work you may get away with 50 GB free space, but any serious work requires a lot more.

5 GB can be gone in twenty seconds.

To be honest, I'd say that machine is not suitable for Photoshop. A 120 GB system drive is nowhere near enough.

You might get away with using an external drive with a reasonably fast interface. It won't be a good solution, but you might get it to at least work. Another thing you should do is go into Preferences and set History States to 1. That means you can't undo or go back, but it will drastically reduce the scratch disk requirement.

Advanced raster image editing requires huge amounts of memory, much more than any RAM you may have installed. So temporary working data are written to disk, and that's the scratch disk. It's not Photoshop; just the sheer amount of data.

I can't get any school work done because Photoshop is needed for my first-hour class and it keeps telling me the disk is full

By @Hayden35077261wukp

Moved to the Photoshop forum.

Jane

how much free space is on your os drive?

do you have another drive installed?