[RESOLVED] Shrinking Hard Drive Space

My Computer at work has a 37GB drive according to Windows. Free space is listed as 430MB. Last week I had over 1GB of free space and then over night it went down to 240MB. I used the CleanUp Wizard and uninstalled most everything I do not need and was able to get it up to 430MB. I even turned off System Restore and restarted the machine but no increase in memory. The cache from mozilla has been cleared too.

If I have an infection or malware, it is not being caught by the anitvirus protection installed by work. Everything works fine except for the shrinking space so I do not think I am infected.

When updates are installed by XP what happens to the files that are downloaded. I would like to delete those while still keeping what the updates did. I would also like to delete the backup files that some of the updates create.

I will probably have to have the company wipe the drive and do a reinstall but I would like to see what space I can free on my own.

Thanks for any help.

Doc

Run chkdsk /R

That may take care of it.

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When updates are installed by XP what happens to the files that are downloaded. I would like to delete those while still keeping what the updates did. I would also like to delete the backup files that some of the updates create.

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You can remove these files/folders using a nice little app called ccleaner: http://www.ccleaner.com/

The files/folders in question will in your /WINDOWS directory (be sure to show hidden files to see them). They typically start with $NTUninstall....

In ccleaner, the option under System called 'Windows Log Files' is the option that removes them.

Run ccleaner in Analyze mode first, and go through the list before deleting.

TEk

It could be System Restore points that are taking a lot of the space, by default Win XP will take a lot of space for Sys Restore if left to its own devices. You can change the amount of space it will take in the Control Panel>System>System Restore tab. I always found that 400MB or so was more than enough.

Fact is, we have had people have system restore exceed the limit impossed by the OS several times in the past.

SuperSparks: I had turned off System Restore rebooted and then lowered the amount of space it would take. No change in hard drive space.

Train: I ran chkdsk /R and everything came back fine.

Teknophobia: Thanks for the info.

At this point I will let the computer people from the office deal with this since if there are any screw ups it will be on them.

Thanks for all of the help.

Doc

My pleasure Doc :)

TEk

I am thinking that is best too.

Had the computer people at work look into the problem. It seems that MS Office was corrupted in such a way that it was downloading installation files for updates constantly and that it was taking up over 20GB of space.

They uninstalled Office and then did a fresh reinstall and all is now well.

Doc

Sweet, at least they're earning their bucks' worth! Never heard of that one.

TEk

That one was right weird alright.

I had never heard of that either. I am glad it happened at work since if it was my home computer I probably would have had to do a fresh install of Windows.

Doc

I would probably have done that clean install bit too. :(