[Beskargam]

ok iv got a 232 gig hardrive and for some reason iv only got 5.5 left.  . this makes no sense to me as there are absolulty no programs that use that much space. I was looking on the internet for ideas and i found a website that said it might be temp files. and apparently a bunch get created whenever the computer doesnt get shut down correctly which has been happening a lot because WOW keeps freezing. thoughts? advice? guidance? i really dont know what im doing at all

[achtung]

http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner

Give it a shot, see what happens.

There's a good chance you also have a bunch of crap stored back you've forgotten about. You'll need to sift through everything to find the culprit. Or you could just wipe and reinstall, backing up only the essentials.

[Flipside]

First step:

Start -> All Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools -> Disk Cleanup

If it's temp files or Internet files, that should help. But beyond that, you'd need to go through your disk and see what's actually on there.

[Beskargam]

dont have money for cc cleaner. and it was reformatted like 2 months ago.

and cool thx. actually already running disc cleanup now.

[LHN91]

ccleaner is free. Download link here - http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner/download/standard

You'd be surprised how quickly small files and old downloads can fill up a drive. I do a lot of computer maintenance for people I know, and it's funny how many people have 500 Gb drives full of small downloaded files and temp file.

[Beskargam]

k thx. downloaded and takin a looksie

[LHN91]

Alternatively, If that doesn't clear up enough space, you may not realize just how large some of your programs are. My FS2 folder is almost 8Gb by itself. Once you include the OS, any office apps, any other games, any music and videos you have stored, it adds up pretty quickly.

[Beskargam]

i dont see myself having that many that would take so much but i really dont know squat. how wld i check for those? nothing in add/remove programs is near even 1 gig except starcraft 2 and WOW

[Trivial Psychic]

At the beginning of the year, I had a problem where space on my C: drive was rapidly disappearing.  I was installing and downloading everything to my secondary 500GB drive, so I couldn't understand how space kept disappearing.  I recall clearing out some old software and clearing up 2GB worth of space one morning, only to have it gobbled back up by the end of the day.  I eventually determined that a virus of some kind had infected Norton (specifically Norton System Works) somehow, disguising itself as an auto-update utility.  Uninstalling System Works managed to clear out the occupied space, but the program itself refused to go.  Even AFTER I'd uninstalled both Norton Anti-Virus and System Works, it still said that it was an essential program.  By that time I had already planned to reformat my C: drive (along with D: and E: drives since they were all partitions of the same physical drive) and do a major upgrade to my core hardware and replace my key software.  My brother-in-law eventually DID remove the program by tracking its process in the manager and disabled it, allowing the virus to be deleted.  Let it be known however, that no anti-virus software I tried would detect this.  It took directory-by-directory searching to see where all the space was being taken up.

[LHN91]

I'm not sure how much SC2 and WoW take up as I don't play those, but add those two up, and then take a look down the list in Add/Remove programs. How many are more than 100 or 200 Mb? add those up, even just approximately.

How much music do you have? even if you don't know the size, how many songs? Windows XP, Vista, or 7? XP takes up relatively little, but on my system 7 takes up 20 Gb by itself. You'll probably find that once you add all the seemingly small things that you have a pretty big number.

If you can, go to your (in XP) My Computer -> Local Disk C: and right click on Documents and Settings, go to Properties, or (in Vista/7) go to Computer ->Local Disk C: and right click on Users. Take a look at the Size value in the window that pops up. That'll tell you if the culprit lies primarily in the size of the installed programs or in your Music/Videos/Documents/Downloads.

If neither of these areas seem to add up to anywheres near the 232 Gigs of your drive, then it might be time to suspect a virus. I DO NOT recommend Norton. Personally, I run avast Free and that seems to do the trick, but so far I've avoided any major viruses

[Beskargam]

they dont. um shld the numbers be constantly going up? and im running xp

[LHN91]

They constantly go up until they actually add up all of the files in the folder. It took about 60 seconds for it to add up my Windows folder and tell me it took up 20Gb

Okay, well XP takes up more like 5Gb when updated, so that won't be it.

[Tyrian]

If I need to find what's taking up space on my disk, I grab WinDirStat (Link:  http://windirstat.info/).  It represents your hard drive as a series of blocks.  The larger the block, the bigger its size.  Also, you can click on individual blocks to see a graphical representation of its contents.  It's really useful in situations like this.

[LHN91]

I keep forgetting about that little program. That would probably be the easiest way.

[Luis Dias]

hmm yeah, that one and the all-too-secretive right click on a directory and click "properties" to see where the gigabytes went.

Jesus. And to think that in the old days I had actually to type dir/s and check lists and lists of files to see where my MEGAbytes went.

[Rodo]

Why do you guys install programs for things that you'll probably do better, such as discovering which folders are overloading a disc drive?


Just navigate through the disc and look for big folders, then investigate those deeply, you'll find what's causing your problem that way.

[LHN91]

That was what I was trying to explain at first, but if memory serves windirstat is a sub-meg program that needs no installation, gives useful information and doesn't require much in the way of prior knowledge.

If this was me searching for where the Gigs were going, then that's exactly how i would do it; look for large top-level folders with right click->properties and work down into them to find the worst offender.

And seeing as I grew up with an IBM PS/2 running DOS 5.0, yes I too remember the days of dir/s

[Nuke]

two words, automatic updates. sometimes i think youre better off disabling them.

[Luis Dias]

two words, automatic updates. sometimes i think youre better off disabling them.

...because they occupy 200 GB? wow.

[Nuke]

they whore space. i set moms computer up 2 years ago with windows xp a virus scanner, firefox and not a whole lot else. the os, and virus scanner were on automatic update, firefox and plugins (flash,java) updates were done. it used up roughly a quarter of a 20gb hard drive when i was finished with it. last week i did some overdue maintanence and the hard drive was full. i managed to get usage down to half so i could defrag the drive. i notice the same kind of thing on my computer, where i dont put any files of mine on the system partition. i metered internet usage last time i reinstalled an os. i had to download about 2 gigs of stuff to get it working. drivers, service packs, etc.

i have to meter my throughput here because we got capped internet. and i find that "updates" is a big slice out of that. all this data has to go somewhere. update clients are annoying, especially when you have to update them.