ufcrusher

My mother called me the other day regarding the fact that her computer was "full". I asked her what she meant as she has a hard drive that is larger than mine and large enough that she shouldnt run into problems. Sure enough, when I get here, the 40gigs are full, but my mother swears to me that it was half free the day before. I start looking into the computer and from what I can see there is nowhere near enough information to fill up the drive. There is a few gigs of pictures and less than a gig of other files. So now I am even more confused, I burn all of her files onto a cdr and delete them from the computer, yet only 3 gigs are cleared up, just like I had determined were there.

At this point, I see that she has a number of programs installed that she doesnt need. I go about deleting a bunch of them and tired of the hounding that I was getting, end up leaving. I come back the next day and she has deleted even more programs that she installed and didnt want anymore. (Seeing as her hard drive was full) The thing is I can see that these programs are gone, yet the hard drive didnt free up any more space. (SHe used the program uninstaller)

I end up buying her an 80 gig WD 7200 rpm drive, but i tell her I want to get to the bottom of what is eating up your space before I install it. Unfortunately, I have had no luck determining what the problem is. As such, I went ahead and installed the new drive today, yet there is an issue already.

The 80 gig drive was just installed and I have done nothing to it, yet its only showing up as 74.5 gigs, thereby 5.5 gigs are missing. I used the western digital software for the install and it claimed to not need to be partioned and that the entire drive would be there.

Thus:

Anyone have any ideas about where the 5.5 gigs are?

Anyone have any ideas about where all the missing space on the original drive could be, or what could be taking it up?

Any suggestions at all. I am over here working on this system right now.

Thanks.

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I have a 120gig install and it shows only 113.5.... I also have 200 GB installed and it shows 183.... My SD card is 1 GB and it shows 948mb...

ray

In response to the new hard drive, even though a hard drive is listed as having an 80gb capacity, when it is formatted for use, you will lose some of that space for whatever system information/files/formatting occurs.

slaus

The harddrive is sold using the decimal system whereas the operating system uses the binary system. The harddrive manufacturers can say an 80GB harddrive is 80,000,000,000 bytes when using power of 10. However, the operating system uses power of 2 so the harddrive you bought really is 74.5 GB. Its a deceptive marketing practice.

ufcrusher

Well that explains the one issue, but not the other. Anyone want to hazard a guess as to what the hell is going on there?

bbrian

something has to be taking up the space... try this:
http://www.werkema.com/software/spacemonger.html
little strage to use at first.. click the 'open' button and select a drive. pretty straight forward after that. Basically whatever box takes up most of the screen is the folder containing the majority of the used disk space.

kei2

Try a defrag after uninstalling?

ray

Try running adaware and spybot!

Jeffbx

Hey, that's cool! I see I have over 8GB of restore points on my system - guess that can stand a little cleaning up...

bbrian

We use that util on some file servers at work to see what customers are taking up all of the space. Very handy to have around when drive space seems to dissappear.

ufcrusher

That util was great! It found the problem although frankly I am not sure what caused it. When I used the software, it showed that over 15gigs were being taken up by data in a "Temp" folder. Now, I know that she clears her temporary internet files all the time as well as the cookies and history. I have even gone through and done it myself, which is why it took me as surprise that this monster area existed.

To top that off, many of the files were all the same pictures over and over again. I also found similar areas under the other users areas. (Win XP divided into 3 active users, 1 catch all)

Anyone have any idea what could be causing this or why its not being cleared out when everything else is removed?

Thanks.

LPMiller

Program files > Accessories > System Tools > Disc cleanup. I'm sure it's restore points, temp files and cache files.

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ufcrusher

That was one of the first things that was done. In fact, it was one of the first things I ever showed my mother how to do and she does it way more often than necessary. But for some people here, probably not a bad suggestion.

Maarchk

Thats odd that your temp file is soo full... Is your mom surfing the porn? Just kidding.. Hmm sounds like the problem is all better... but does she have a lot of different log ins or something? Thats the only thing i could think of. Or maybe some virus or something multiplying itself around...

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mcs328

We used to have Norton AV Corp addition and it would have huge log files that took up 10 gigs of space. We didn't know until I went on my co-workers machine and we looked for files and we found it. It was giganourmous and it seemed to be happening more often. So we switched to McAffee a few weeks later.

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