Data Files

[Alan]

Hi,
I'm new to this group so I'm sure not if this is an appropriate place
to ask this, if not, please accept my apologies.
My son called me today and said that there was only about 9 Gig free
space left on his 40 Gig hard drive as opposed to about 23 Gig on Friday and
asked my advice.
After the usual questions about downloads etc, I advised him to go
Start > Search > *.* and to list all files by size descending.
At the top of the list were three Data files, (file ext .dat), two of
which were approx 5 Gig and one of approx 3 Gig.
Unfortunately he deleted them without noting the details of where they were
stored or the names of they files (great!) but he did remember that they
were all numeric file names with several leading zeros. Going 'Properties'
gave no clue as to what they were. No ill effects are apparent after
deleting these files.
He downloads a lot from the net, mainly video, music and shareware. My
question is, can anyone suggest where these enormous files could of come
from? Obviously one could not download files of that size without knowing,
even on cable it would take forever, so I assume that something must of
generated them somehow.
Any advice much appreciated,
Regards,
Alan.

 

[Malke]

Hi,
I'm new to this group so I'm sure not if this is an appropriate
place
to ask this, if not, please accept my apologies.
My son called me today and said that there was only about 9 Gig
free
space left on his 40 Gig hard drive as opposed to about 23 Gig on
Friday and asked my advice.
After the usual questions about downloads etc, I advised him to
go
Start > Search > *.* and to list all files by size descending.
At the top of the list were three Data files, (file ext .dat),
two of
which were approx 5 Gig and one of approx 3 Gig.
Unfortunately he deleted them without noting the details of where they
were stored or the names of they files (great!) but he did remember
that they were all numeric file names with several leading zeros.
Going 'Properties' gave no clue as to what they were. No ill effects
are apparent after deleting these files.
He downloads a lot from the net, mainly video, music and
shareware. My
question is, can anyone suggest where these enormous files could of
come
from? Obviously one could not download files of that size without
knowing, even on cable it would take forever, so I assume that
something must of generated them somehow.
Any advice much appreciated,
Regards,
Alan.

This is a good place to post questions just like yours, and you did a
good job of clearly explaining the problem. His space may be eaten up
by 1) System Restore points; 2) hibernation file (you can disable
hibernation in the Power applet in Control Panel). That said, he is
indulging in risky computing by downloading so much, presumably with
p2p software like Kazaa. He should be be sure to run current antivirus
using updated definitions - note that "current" means a version not
older than 2002. He should also regularly remove spyware with tools
such as Spybot S&D (www.security.kolla.de) and/or Ad-aware
(www.lavasoftusa.com) - note that it is a good idea to do virus and
spyware scans in Safe Mode.

Cheers,

Malke

 

[Alan]

This is a good place to post questions just like yours, and you did a
good job of clearly explaining the problem. His space may be eaten up
by 1) System Restore points; 2) hibernation file (you can disable
hibernation in the Power applet in Control Panel). That said, he is
indulging in risky computing by downloading so much, presumably with
p2p software like Kazaa. He should be be sure to run current antivirus
using updated definitions - note that "current" means a version not
older than 2002. He should also regularly remove spyware with tools
such as Spybot S&D (www.security.kolla.de) and/or Ad-aware
(www.lavasoftusa.com) - note that it is a good idea to do virus and
spyware scans in Safe Mode.

Cheers,

Malke

Thanks for the advice, we ran Norton 2003 and found every thing clean, but
after downloading and running Spybot, there were God knows how many spyware
files in the system. Needless to say we've deleted them all.
I looked at Hibernation in control panel. As I understand it, this is a
facility to save what is unsaved before the machine hibernates to avoid loss
of data, (not entirely sure though). Does this file just keep growing every
time the machine hibernates?
Even if it does, 13 Gig seems an awful lot!
I still cant really understand how those huge files came to be there, surely
no spyware program would be that size and if it were a virus, its not a very
good one (good from a virus writers warped point of view that is) if all you
have to do to get rid of it is to simply delete a few files, albeit large
ones.
I don't know much about system restore points, I'll have to go into that a
bit more, I'm no expert on these matters as you've probably gathered. Any
advice on here gratefully received!
Thanks again for the response, We'll monitor it on a regular basis and see
what transpires,
Regards,
Alan.
BTW he is using Kazaa