Matter

Hello tech support people,
I have a new Dell D630 Latitude laptop purchased last April off a reseller on ebay. When I got it I made sure it was working but am just now getting around to using it for the intended purpose.

XP pro v2002, SP2, core 2duo. C drive properties shows 8.38 GB being used on the 80 GB drive [74.4 capacity].

I ran Belarc Advisor, it shows XP, roxio, avira av, norton systemworks 2003, latter 2 installed by me.

I did not check the used space before these two additions.

My Documents/pictures/music = around 250 KB

I bought this to dedicate to audio work/recording, before I start installing software and tweaking XP [possibly reinstalling first] I'd be really curious to know what is taking up all this space? My research tells me 4 or 5 Gigs would be normal.

A friend recommended I run the Norton cleansweep, it only removed 2 Mb. I would prefer not going on the internet with this machine, I installed Avira as a safety net because it is known to not interfere with the audio software I will be installing [Magix Samplitude].

thank you for any insights,
Matt

Eremon1

It's difficult to say without looking, but if I had to guess I'd say that maybe its one of these things;

1.System Restore has more reserved than normal. To check this right-click on My Computer and select Properties. Then goto the System Restore tab.

2.Perhaps the Recycle Bin has a good chunk of the disk reserved, to check that right-click on the Recycle Bin and select properties. There you should see a slider that sets how much drive space is reserved for deleted files.

3.If it isn't those things I'd also check the windows swapfile size and see how big it's been set to. Right-click on My Computer and select Properties, then the Advanced tab. In the Performance box hit the Settings button and then Advanced tab. At the bottom there should be a box Virtual Memory with a button Change. Hit that and there you can see how big the Windows PageFile<Swapfile> is in MB.

Try that and report back your findings if you were successful or not.

elf

There are programs available that will show you where the space is being used. I haven't used any myself but have seen various programs suggested here.

After a brief google search I found one program which should do the trick. http://www.jgoodies.com/freeware/jdiskreport/index.html is the site.

wolski888

Program files are very big.
But tbh, 80 is not going to go too far. 120 is not enough for me.
I do movie stuff.

Matter

Thank you folks...

Eremon1:
system restore had the maximum, I changed to minimum, rebooted, no difference in C space usage.

Recycle Bin had 3.5 G.B., changed to 1.5, no difference.

Swapfile had 2046 MB, changed to zero and that did indeed lessen usage by 2 GB.

I'm not tech savvy enough to know exactly what swapfile is about but I'm putting stuff back where it was, don't mind the space usage just wondered what was going on.

Elf:
Thanks for the tip. I did some google and found this page at Geek to Live:

http://lifehacker.com/software/disk-...age-219058.php

In the comments there's a bunch more links to other apps, I ended up going with the WinDirStat and Scanner [both freeware]. I stayed away from the JdiskReport due to the false positive mentioned with AVG free, I use AVG on my internet machine.

WinDirStat shows roughly 2 gigs Files, 2 Windows, 1 i386, 1 program files, so on, nothing alarming that I can see.

Wolski888: you may have misread my post? The size of my HD [80 GB] was not my concern but why was 8.3 GB being taken up with nothing installed by me yet, I was told around 5 gigs would be normal. Thanks though, I agree the more space the better!

Matt

Fren Banklin

TreeSize

Matter

Thanks Fren, I may try that one out as well. I had it bookmarked from reading the comments in the Geek to Live link.

elf

This is the one I have seen mentioned multiple times, but can never remember the name of it. From everything I have heard this program works very well.

Fren Banklin

It's easily the best software of it's type that I've found in 5 years of active and interested looking.

Matter

I'm installing it now, thanks! That opening paragraph on their site sounds great.

Eremon1

Changing the system restore and recycle bin sizes should have yielded some extra space, but not 4GB worth. On my system and on the average system Windows XP Pro's C:\windows dir should only take up 2.5GB - 3.5GB. All in all about 4GB-5GB on a barebones system is what I'd expect to see. Did you install windows or was it already installed. Does it have any bundled OEM software installed?

One thing to note, changing your swapfile to zero probably won't do much except make your system slow. A swapfile is a place that is used by windows as an addition to your system RAM, so when something isn't being currently used by RAM it will be placed in the swapfile/pagefile for future access when needed. This is something that most users actually need. So I'd set it back the way it was.

It sounds like one of those applications to report disk usage would be a good idea.

Matter

Thanks to WinDirStat and TreeSize programs just discovered hibernation was activated [which I never use] and learned about related hiberfil.sys file which was taking up 2 gigs of space.

Time to sleep, will get back to this, thank you Eremon1.

Eremon1

Damn and you know, I was sitting at work during the night shift and was thinking about your problem and it hit me to ask about the hibernation file and if it was set to active but I got caught up with work and have been so busy this past weekend.

Glad you found it, with that 2GB regained you should be about normal for HDD usage now. Slainte!