John said:
I recently got a message that my c drive is almost full. I removed some
unwanted files, defragmented, clean the disc etc, but wanted to see just
where the files were. After going through each file folder I discovered
that my Documents and Settings file had 9.74GB's in it. So I checked every
folder, there are only a few, in the folder and discovered that they barely
add up to one GB. There is however one folder marked WINDOWS that contains
a folder called SYSTEM that is empty..a read only file. Where is the other
8/74 GB's?
There is another WINDOWS folder on the C drive not within the Documents
and Settings folder which seems to contain the Windows XP program that I
am using. it is about 3 GB's.
Any help in finding what is in the D & S folder would be appreciated.
thanks John
One of the things is that by default, some of the folders that collect
masses of files are hidden. You have to change the options, in Explorer,
under View, Folder options to see them.
There's an excellent free tool named ccleaner :
www.ccleaner.com that will,
if you tell it to, remove most of the temporary files that you aren't
finding. Note that it does by default remove cookies, but you are able to
keep all or some or none of them.
If you look in Internet Explorer, under Tools, Internet Options, on the
General tab - in the Temporary Internet Files section, there's a Settings
button. Click that and you'll see how much space it decided to claim.
This is sometimes several gigabytes, in hidden folders. I normally set
this down to perhaps 20 megabytes. If you tell IE to delete the files,
and check again, you'll probably find many of them still there. ccleaner
works very well for this.
Note that there are "Temporary Internet Files \content.ie5" folders for each
user account. After changing the View options to un-hide the directories,
I usually use a search tool named Agent Ransack,
http://www.mythicsoft.com/agentransack/ , and just do a search for
content.ie5. I then delete the contents of those directories.
Or, I simply install ccleaner so that all users can see it and then log into
each account and run it.
You may notice that the default locations for the Outlook Express address
book and email stores are also hidden, which can make them harder to back
up.
With Outlook Express, go to Tools, Options, Maintenance, Clean Up Now, and
compact the files. You may find that it's appropriate to delete files if
you are using newsgroups. If you completely exit Outlook Express and go to
the Store Folder where the mail files are, you might find that the Deleted
Messages file is large. If you're sure you don't need anything that was
deleted, you can delete this file; sometimes it seems to just not compact.
Also, on many machines, hibernation is enabled by default. This creates an
image file in the root directory, hiberfil.sys, the size of the installed
memory - that is, if your machine has 512 meg ram, that file is 512 meg. .
To turn this off and delete the file, right-click on the desktop and choose
Properties. Choose the Screen Saver tab, then choose Power in the lower
right corner. Go to the Hibernate tab and de-select "Enable Hibernation".
Choose Apply, then OK back to the desktop.
If you feel you need hibernation, however, don't do this.
HTH
-pk
