Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: Beskargam on March 09, 2011, 07:59:28 pm
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ok iv got a 232 gig hardrive and for some reason iv only got 5.5 left. :banghead:. 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
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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.
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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.
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dont have money for cc cleaner. and it was reformatted like 2 months ago.
and cool thx. actually already running disc cleanup now.
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ccleaner is free. Download link here - http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner/download/standard (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.
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k thx. downloaded and takin a looksie
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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they dont. um shld the numbers be constantly going up? and im running xp
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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.
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If I need to find what's taking up space on my disk, I grab WinDirStat (Link: http://windirstat.info/ (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.
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I keep forgetting about that little program. That would probably be the easiest way.
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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.
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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.
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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
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two words, automatic updates. sometimes i think youre better off disabling them.
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two words, automatic updates. sometimes i think youre better off disabling them.
...because they occupy 200 GB? wow.
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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.
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Try http://windirstat.info/
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ok so disk cleaner cleared about 5 gigs. ran ccleaner on both registry and c drive. didnt find all that much. running norton scan down and dowloading windir.stat thing. wow. my documents and settings folder on c drive is 70.5 gigs. . .is that normal? and i possibly might have lost free space overnite. not sure bout that one. writing it down for today
ok my sisters profile is by far the largest space eater at 35.7. scratch that the restore folder is largest at like 70 some and climbing. should the restore be that much?
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my documents and settings folder on c drive is 70.5 gigs. . .is that normal?
Probably not.
EDIT:
What? restore folder??
Have you ever used that thing anyway?, disable the service right now and delete the folder, it's of no use, aside from being a perfect place to save viruses and other useless data.
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kay. what do i do then? broken down my sisters profile makes senses for a lotta music she has and the owners profile has another 30 for all the rest of our familys stuff. so i think that might be reasonable.
hmmmm the restore folder on the c drive is like 100.1 gigs. . ..that cant be normal. . .
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and i have no idea if we used it. we had the computer wiped 2 months ago, reformatted and had most of our stuff put back on but it wouldnt take that much. you sure i should delete it?
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windirstat is amazing. all the space in documents and setting is from my sisters itunes movies and a lot of pictures we took aways back.
ok the conspicuiously gone space is being used for the restore folder on the c drive. using almost 100 gigs. can i delete that?
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Wait for someone who is certain to give a response before you do so, but as far as I can tell, if you don't ever use the System Restore to step the computer back when an update/driver doesn't work, then it's probably ok.
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System restore is useless, left click on my pc icon in the desktop, then properties, search for the system restore (or something like that) tab, then disable it.
It should remove all the restore points saved when doing so.
If you are really, REALLY sure you're gonna be using it a lot, then maybe it's got a degree of use, but for the regular user it's just wasted disc space.
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I've certainly never used it in my entire life, but, not wanting to show off, with 3TB of disc space, I've never really needed to concern myself with the room it takes up either :nervous:
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ya weve never used it and its takin up a ton of space. deleted it. annddd that seems to have solved my space issue. btw thx for the WinDirStat amazingly useful tool. and thx for all the advice and help you guys gave
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:yes:
We at HLP are always glad to introduce new people into freespace :nervous:
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ok so disk cleaner cleared about 5 gigs. ran ccleaner on both registry and c drive. didnt find all that much. running norton scan down and dowloading windir.stat thing. wow. my documents and settings folder on c drive is 70.5 gigs. . .is that normal? and i possibly might have lost free space overnite. not sure bout that one. writing it down for today
ok my sisters profile is by far the largest space eater at 35.7. scratch that the restore folder is largest at like 70 some and climbing. should the restore be that much?
theres yer problem, you let your sister use your computer. never ever let anyone use your computer, ever, especially someone of the female persuasion.
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Actually, one of the most competent students in my Uni class was a girl. It's not really to do with gender, just experience and knowledge.
I think the problem here is more likely the fact that it seems no-one in the house has computer knowledge beyond the general level, I'm certainly not knocking anyone for that, but it always helps to have someone who knows a bit about what's 'under the hood' as it were. Like any tool, knowledge of its details can vastly improve the quality of the output :)
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well i speak from expirience. my sister destroys electronics routinely. i tell her to bring me her junkified electronics so i can scrap parts from them, and she brings me something every other week for me to take apart.
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In general, if I know that someone who is a 'general purpose' (read: facebook, msn, youtube, music) computer user is going to use a system, I try to make it as "idiot-proof" as possible. Chrome installed, IE hidden, Adblock installed to keep them from clicking on any ads. Limited account if possible. It seems to work pretty well.
My girlfriend is slowly learning how to not destroy her computer. All she uses is stuff like skype, msn, facebook, and web browsing; and I haven't had to fix her system in quite a bit. However, it likely helps that I set up an old Pentium 3 laptop with Lubuntu for when her friends are around. Limited account, Chrome/Midori and emesene, all labeled as Internet and MSN. They can hardly tell the difference. And with the limited account, it's nearly impossible to kill.
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System restore is not useless. Far from it.
If you set it to remember both system settings and files and moderate its use of hard drive space, you can restore contents of any folder stored on hard drive that has system restore enabled. For example, you just accidentally deleted a folder that was full of important files. No problem, create new folder of same name, right click on it, select properties and previous version, now you can restore lost contents. I had that happen once, I was rather pissed off until I remembered I had this enabled and it really saved the day.
The key here is to moderate disk space usage of system restore. Setting it to something like 5% of total hard disk space can be extremely useful one day. It's like those airbags in a car, they're useless too except for the split second they're needed to avoid fatal injury.
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If i remember correctly, System restore on XP gives you an estimate of how many restore points that a given percentage setting will give you. Set it so that you have space for 1 or 2 restore points, and that should be plenty. I seem to remember that at one point I had it set to something like 3%, just enough for one restore point.
Admittedly, I may be wrong on that one. My regular use systems are Windows 7 or Linux Mint. XP is only really on my old backup laptop and a couple of P4's i keep around because I hate throwing working systems away.
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system restore is the bane of every virus that doesn't wipe out all restore points.
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i only create one after installing the system, service packs and drivers and maybe a virus scanner (and before anything is allowed to do any online updates). i would say it would be better to ghost the system partition at this point and keep the image on file. this works especially well if you keep data on an entirely different partition/drive.
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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.
www.driverpacks.net
www.autopatcher.com
Also, you can slipstream your service packs into your OS...
EDIT: Also, depending on the size of the drive, I set the system restore size as close to 1 Gigabyte as I can get. Usually, that makes 1%-3%... 1% of 232 GB is 2.32 GB, so I'd set it at 1%. Really, how much space does a restore need? To back up modified files shouldn't take more than a few hundred megabytes, maybe half a gig or more if you're installing a service pack! IIRC Restore Points don't clone your entire windows and programs, only the parts that are modified.
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this is the kind of thing i absolutely refuse to automate. though i have been known to spin off special modified versions of windows install disks. and use those for setup, id rather just have a ghosted partition on file that i can just apply and use right off the bat.
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True. But you can torrent Windows disks with the latest SP already installed, MD5 = retail. I'm pretty sure the update process makes some waste in the registry and possibly the file system too.
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I just fixed a system with a similar problem. Issue was windows\installer directory had about 200 copies of the same 4 installer files that were failing on auto-updates. After removing them the updates worked. Still waiting on the results to see if the problem returns or there are any side effects. Note I did not delete any read-only files in that directory or ones with different naming schemes then the windows update ones.