[RESOLVED] Shrinking Hard Drive Space

[Doc]

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

[Train]

Run chkdsk /R

That may take care of it.

[Teknophobia]

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.

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

[SuperSparks]

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.

[Train]

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

[Doc]

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

[Teknophobia]

My pleasure Doc

TEk

[Train]

I am thinking that is best too.

[Doc]

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

[Teknophobia]

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

TEk

[Train]

That one was right weird alright.

[Doc]

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

[Train]

I would probably have done that clean install bit too.