Hi, James.
Yes, 4 GB should be plenty for WinXP - but it tends to expand to fill the
space available. (Isn't that Parkinson's Law?)
Many of the defaults in WinXP are set to protect newbies from themselves.
Experienced users often get frustrated by the lack of information and
control and change those defaults. Some of the changes are in Folder
Options | View. You've already found Show hidden files and folders. You
might also want to check the box for Display the contents of system folders
and uncheck both Hide extensions for known file types and Hide protected
operating system files. These changes won't automatically create more room
on your HD, but they will let you more intelligently assess your space
requirements.
Some large files are normally hidden, as you know. There are all those
operating system files in the \Windows folder and its many subfolders, of
course. Then there is the Recycle Bin, which will empty itself -
eventually - but which you can empty now to free up more space. When we
delete files, the free space doesn't seem to change because the system first
just moves them to the Recycle Bin, where they continue to use space (which
doesn't show up in Explorer, by default) until the Bin is emptied. (Norton
has its own Protected Recycle Bin, which also must be emptied if you are
using that.)
The page file (also called the paging file or the swap file or virtual
memory) uses 1.5 times your physical RAM, by default, and is on your Drive
C:, by default. You can change the size, and you can put it into a
different volume, if you choose. Go to System Properties | Advanced |
Performance Settings | Advanced | Virtual Memory Change. You can set the
usage on each volume to No paging file, then go back to the one volume of
your choice and click System managed size; be sure to click Set for each
volume. You can move this page file to Drive D:, freeing up the space on
C:. After rebooting to have the change take effect, you can delete the
no-longer-used C:\pagefile.sys. If you have 1 GB RAM, this might free up
1.5 GB of disk space on C:.
If you use hibernation, you should also find the file C:\hiberfil.sys; it
will be equal to your physical RAM, plus a few bytes for overhead. You
can't change the size or location of this file, but you should know that it
is there and accounts for some of your "lost" space. My RAM is 1 GB;
hiberfil.sys is 1,073,258,496 bytes, dated when I turned on my computer this
morning.
Many programs (like Internet Explorer) create temporary files and, by
default, nearly all of them put those Temp files on C:. Some programs let
you move those files. The Temporary Internet Files (TIF), for example, can
be moved pretty easily. Start IE, click Tools | Internet Options..., and on
the first (General) tab, study the TIF section. Click Settings... to see
the Current location, where your TIF folder is now; if it is on C:, click
Move folder... and pick a new location. Note that you also can change the
Amount of disk space to use for the TIF. You might also want to click the
Advanced tab, scroll all the way down to the Security heading and check
Empty TIF when browser is closed; especially if you have broadband, IE can
download a page again almost as fast as it can retrieve it from the TIF.
Similarly, you can change the location of your email/news Store Folder in OE
by clicking Tools | Options... and on the Maintenance tab, click Store
Folder... and change the location. In both IE and OE, you'll have to close
and restart the programs to complete the process; you may also want to check
the former locations to be sure that everything got cleaned up.
Even with all this, WinXP probably will continue trying to grow. :>(
RC
