G
Guest
I have XP Professional running on a 40GB HD partitioned into C and D drives
of 20GB each.
I recently attempted to defrag C drive - error message advised that I had
insufficient space to complete a full defrag. Surprising since programs took
up only 8GB of the 20GB. I did however uninstall a couple of programs I
hardly use in an effort to free up space but this had no effect.
After a sherlock holmes type investigation I found that the cuprit was the
the C;\Documents and Settings\[user name]\Local Settings\Temp folder. I
deleted all these 1400 odd files and the defrag was clean and successful.
I was not aware of the existance of the temporary folder because (as I now
know) it is a hidden folder.
My problem is that since taking this action two things have happened:
1) Booting up takes a longer than usual and
2) Two temporary files are created (which remain forever) at each boot up
and occasionally during the day as a result of doing something that I haven't
quite worked out yet but seems it might be as a result of doing something in
windows explorer - like deleting a file - but not always!.
The only other odd thing is that all links in "Help and Support" no longer
work eg, "related topics". Discovered this whilst trying to troubleshoot my
problem.
Apart from the above everything works fine and fast once the computer has
booted up.
I have an automatically updated virus scanner (CA Anti Virus) and have done
several complete scans of both C and D drives with nothing found.
The temporary files seem to come often in pairs of size 144kb and 588kb and
always have the name ~DF[random numbers].tmp. Some days there can be 20 or
more of these accumulating in the Temp folder. Obviously they had been
accumulating for many months before I realised the problem. Unfortunately I
had deleted the files without looking at the date of the first one so I'm not
exactly sure of how long this has been going on - quite a long time it seems
to take up 8 or 9GB of space!
A system restore has had no effect - probably because it has been going on
longer than 3 months.
Would appreciate any help anyone can give me to solve this problem without
having to completely reformat or reload XP completely.
Thanks.
of 20GB each.
I recently attempted to defrag C drive - error message advised that I had
insufficient space to complete a full defrag. Surprising since programs took
up only 8GB of the 20GB. I did however uninstall a couple of programs I
hardly use in an effort to free up space but this had no effect.
After a sherlock holmes type investigation I found that the cuprit was the
the C;\Documents and Settings\[user name]\Local Settings\Temp folder. I
deleted all these 1400 odd files and the defrag was clean and successful.
I was not aware of the existance of the temporary folder because (as I now
know) it is a hidden folder.
My problem is that since taking this action two things have happened:
1) Booting up takes a longer than usual and
2) Two temporary files are created (which remain forever) at each boot up
and occasionally during the day as a result of doing something that I haven't
quite worked out yet but seems it might be as a result of doing something in
windows explorer - like deleting a file - but not always!.
The only other odd thing is that all links in "Help and Support" no longer
work eg, "related topics". Discovered this whilst trying to troubleshoot my
problem.
Apart from the above everything works fine and fast once the computer has
booted up.
I have an automatically updated virus scanner (CA Anti Virus) and have done
several complete scans of both C and D drives with nothing found.
The temporary files seem to come often in pairs of size 144kb and 588kb and
always have the name ~DF[random numbers].tmp. Some days there can be 20 or
more of these accumulating in the Temp folder. Obviously they had been
accumulating for many months before I realised the problem. Unfortunately I
had deleted the files without looking at the date of the first one so I'm not
exactly sure of how long this has been going on - quite a long time it seems
to take up 8 or 9GB of space!
A system restore has had no effect - probably because it has been going on
longer than 3 months.
Would appreciate any help anyone can give me to solve this problem without
having to completely reformat or reload XP completely.
Thanks.