Win XP OS

I have lost 3GB of Disk space on my C drive over the last couple of weeks, disk cleanup, disk defragment and, deleting all restart points, recovered 1GB of disk space.

I have downloaded a lot of files over the last 2 weeks and edited these files in MS Word but, all of these files are then stored on another disk.

When I open C Drive these are the folders I see and the size,

Program Files 6.04 GB

Windows 7.88 GB

Documents and Settings 2.55 GB

Opening Documents and Settings I see these folders,

Administrator 3.0 MB

Guest 17.4 MB

All Users 324 MB

User 1.97 GB

Opening User folder I have the following folders

Desktop 12 MB

Livestation 10.1 MB

Favorites 28.4 KB

Start Menu 46.1 KB

This adds up to 22 MB, a long way short of the 1.97GB the User folder shows.

Can anyone point out why the User folder shows so much used space but, its contents only come to 22MB

Any other information on how to recover Disk space would be appreciated

There is a program called WinDirStat that you can download from HERE.

Try it out! It will show you everything in your drive.

OK WinDerStat certainly tells me every thing that's in my C drive but,

I have no idea what most of these things are, for example I have numerous files with names like F38D186d01 @ 10MB

how do I know what is safe to delete

I don't want to be a pain in the neck here.

> I have no idea what most of these things are....

If you don't know what it is then don't delete it.

> ...how do I know what is safe to delete

First establish what your objective really is.

Will your life be happy if you free up an extra 10 Meg? If so then spend time finding out what that particular file is. If you will be more happy with an extra 400 Gig of free disk space go shopping and get into the habit of saving stuff on a portable drive.

Do you have large unwieldy applications taking up space - I doubt it - but use the add remove programs feature to free up unwanted stuff.

BTW - I doubt you 'lost' the 3Gb - but simply used it.

Go to START -> RUN and enter CMD and press enter. In the new window enter chkdsk c:

Does it show any problems with your disk like for instance bad sectors?

Is your folder display switched to hide hidden files?

Try Glary Utilities for the cleanup.

It seems to find junk that other cleaners, like CCleaner, miss.

In the Windows folder look for folder names starting with a $ sign.

These are backup folders from the Windows Update programme

and can usually be deleted after a few days.

I have just deleted one dated 31March accounting for +700Mb of space.

My guess is that Explorer is set to not show Hidden Program and System Files (just like Beggar set)

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/h...iddenfiles.mspx

and that the temp folder contains some massive files which are always safe to delete.

If you are not too familiar with Windows use ccleaner to get rid of temporary files and other junk.

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Security/Secu.../CCleaner.shtml

Standard setting will also wipe Web browser history, stored passwords and form data - be sure you untick those options in the IE or Firefox settings if you want to keep them.

However, CCleaner will never delete any user created files, so it is safe to use also for novice users.

welo

Thanks everyone I ran all the programs you recommended and recovered 340MB of space, I am still not sure where all the space has gone but, I appreciate the help

Did you check the disk with chkdsk? Bad sectors could make your disk a lot smaller. And tools like WinDirStat that sensei mentioned can often show surprising data collections. Just look at the biggest folders and go further down there to find out why they are so big.

^

+1 from me.

And don't forget about changing the explorer setting to show hidden files and folders. Or use WinDirStat which probably shows all folders regardless of the Explorer setting (not sure on this one though)

welo

WinDirStat is a neat little tool.

Thanks for recommending it.

BTW if chkdsk does show bad sectors it is time to do a full backup and replace the disk.

Maybe somebody has hidden a porn folder??

Seriously, though, have you checked the "show hidden folders" option?

Some of the space may have gone to System Restore.

I don't know what others do but I partition my HDD into 3 logical drives as follows:

1] c:\ - for the Operating System only. Programs will not intentionally be loaded onto this drive. Approx 6GB in size to accommodate XP SP3 & future updates plus extraneous stuff added by windows.

2] d:\ - for the 'swapfile' (virtual memory) only. Nothing else goes onto this drive. Between 1GB & 2GB.

3] e:\ - for all of my stuff (programs etc). This includes 'My Documents', which I tell windows to put onto this drive.

I also disable the 'Indexing Service' on each drive as well as all 'prefetch' activities. This saves on disk space & has a minor impact on performance.

The above ensures consistent high speed, reliability & because all of my stuff is on e: drive, I can reload windows (includes a disk format) without destroying my hard earned data.

Remember that if you allocate a swapfile to drive c:, you will see a slow degradation of performance as this drive becomes increasingly fragmented. This is why I allocate a special drive for the swapfile.

The 'prefetch' is similar in that it only relates to the quick opening of files/programs. It might make things a tad quicker but it takes disk space to do so.

The 'Indexing Service' relates to searching. Disabling this will save on disk space.

There are numerous other things that I do but it requires a (one) special program, which is not free.

'Maintenance' is a key word here as well as the words 'File Management'. Most computer users have little idea about file management & as such, make many mistakes by creating a 'messy' file system. Considering that it's such a simple thing to understand, I'm amazed why it is not taught in 'computer courses'.

Of course, System Restore is disabled as I don't know of one anti-virus/anti-malware program that can effectively work whilst System Restore is active.

Thanks again, I have just taken a closer look at WinDirStat and found 3.6GB of history inside a program called PeerBlock .

Problem solved and PeerBlock reconfigured to clear history every day.

Thanks again, I have just taken a closer look at WinDirStat and found 3.6GB of history inside a program called PeerBlock .

Problem solved and PeerBlock reconfigured to clear history every day.

I love happy endings.

Hallelujah!