Out of room on my D: drive

[Kendal]

My laptop is partitioned in two drives, C: (6.53 gig
capacity, used 3.59 gigs) and D: (21.4 gig capacity, used
20.6 gigs).

Odd thing is, if I actually add up the contents of the
folders on D:, their total is just under 4 gigs. I only
reformatted and reinstalled everything last week and I
have very little in the way of files on this machine. I
have had to do about 15 system rollbacks (restores?) in
the past 24 hours and I'm wondering if (and where) XP has
dumped all the extra files (and can I delete them???)...

Any clues how I can lighten things to 4 Gigs again, I'd
hate to have to reformat...

thanks.
Kendal

 

[Guest]

What file system are you using, NTFS or FAT32?
FAT32 is especially wasteful. If you are using FAT32 it may be a better idea
to use many small partitions because clustersizes determine file sizes. Each
file on the disk is rounded up to the nearest cluster. e.g. lets say the
cluster size is 4kb, a 3 byte file really takes up 4kb, and a 25kb file
takes up
28 kb. This may account for extra disk usage. Try deleting all your
temporary files, cookies etc. Tens of Thousands of small files take up quite
a bit of space. Because the cluster size is proportionate or partition size,
small partitions waste less. NTFS clusters are smaller.