Shrinking hdd space

[Jim]

I have a business who has a hand full of Dell laptops. They all seem to be
having the same issue. They have 40GB hard drives and Windows XP Pro with
SP3. They are all connected to a Windows Server 2003 domain. They are all
getting low disk space messages. I know that 40GB is not much but they
shouldn't be using that much space. One in particular had only a couple
hundred MB free. Deleted all the temp files, disabled hibernation and turned
off system restore. It then had 5.5GB of free hdd space. I re-enabled
system restore but set a limit to 2GB. That next morning there was on 70MB
free space left. I disabled system restore agian and it is now showing about
1GB free. Searching for large files or newly created files does not really
come up with anything, at least nothing that is alarming. Since then a
couple more laptops started experiencing the same issue. They are running
Symantec Endpoint 12. No infections have been found. None of their desktops
seem to be having any issues with drive space. What else should I be looking
at? Thanks for your help.

 

[R. McCarty]

In some cases you'll find large files in the \Windows\Installer folder.
Expected size varies depending on what apps you've installed, but an
average size is around 3-5 Gigabytes. I'd check the folder properties
and see how much content your system's folder contains.
*These are important modules and should be removed manually. You
can use a program MSIZap.exe to remove invalid entries. Carefully
read the instructions for the command line usage.

 

[Dan H]

A neat little freebie utility to tell you exactly what is taking up hard
drive space and how much is TreeSize Free.

http://www.jam-software.com/freeware/index.shtml

As suggested be careful of what you delete though but this utility will
indeed tell you what is taking up harddrive space and how much.

 

[Lem]

I have a business who has a hand full of Dell laptops. They all seem to be
having the same issue. They have 40GB hard drives and Windows XP Pro with
SP3. They are all connected to a Windows Server 2003 domain. They are all
getting low disk space messages. I know that 40GB is not much but they
shouldn't be using that much space. One in particular had only a couple
hundred MB free. Deleted all the temp files, disabled hibernation and turned
off system restore. It then had 5.5GB of free hdd space. I re-enabled
system restore but set a limit to 2GB. That next morning there was on 70MB
free space left. I disabled system restore agian and it is now showing about
1GB free. Searching for large files or newly created files does not really
come up with anything, at least nothing that is alarming. Since then a
couple more laptops started experiencing the same issue. They are running
Symantec Endpoint 12. No infections have been found. None of their desktops
seem to be having any issues with drive space. What else should I be looking
at? Thanks for your help.

You really only need about 1 GB for system restore.

Download and run JDiskReport from
http://www.jgoodies.com/freeware/jdiskreport/
That should pinpoint what's taking up the space.

 

[Anthony Buckland]

I have a business who has a hand full of Dell laptops. They all seem to be
having the same issue. They have 40GB hard drives and Windows XP Pro with
SP3. They are all connected to a Windows Server 2003 domain. They are
all
getting low disk space messages. ...
What else should I be looking
at? Thanks for your help.

I don't want to be simplistic, but how about a _much_ bigger
hard drive per machine?

 

[Twayne]

In

I have a business who has a hand full of Dell laptops. They all seem
to be having the same issue. They have 40GB hard drives and Windows
XP Pro with SP3. They are all connected to a Windows Server 2003
domain. They are all getting low disk space messages. I know that
40GB is not much but they shouldn't be using that much space. One in
particular had only a couple hundred MB free. Deleted all the temp
files, disabled hibernation and turned off system restore. It then
had 5.5GB of free hdd space. I re-enabled system restore but set a
limit to 2GB. That next morning there was on 70MB free space left.
I disabled system restore agian and it is now showing about 1GB free.
Searching for large files or newly created files does not really come
up with anything, at least nothing that is alarming. Since then a
couple more laptops started experiencing the same issue. They are
running Symantec Endpoint 12. No infections have been found. None
of their desktops seem to be having any issues with drive space.
What else should I be looking at? Thanks for your help.

It really sounds like malware at work; virus, trojan, worm, etc. Either
that or the server is screwing up and shooting stuff out to the machines,
but I'd more suspect malware. SE if far from suffiicient to be certain you
have no malware, BTW. It's on ly part of the solution. What AV and A
spyware have you been running? You'd better contain it somehow soon or
every maching may have the problem.

HTH,

Twayne`