mr_lemon

On my C drive, I am losing hard disk space every day, a few megabytes at a time. I have not installed any new software, or downloaded anything to my C drive. I have run the disk cleanup utility but there is far more diskspace which seems to have disappeared. Anyone know where???

thanks in advance

whodat

use cleanup in my sig

dont store anything in the temp folders before using

if that doesnt help, run the 5 step procedure in my sig [you using norton?]

if that doesnt help, download the diagnostic utility from the hard drives manufacturer and test the drive

also give us the complete specs of your machine

good luck

Sarge

There's a lot of programs that can eat your free disk space.
Three of them are bundled with XP and two of those are enabled by default. They are:

System Restore: It makes "Restore Points" periodicly. Usefull for newbie users who are continualy ******* up their windows enviroment and don't want to re-install windows. For advanced users who know what they're doing and (and consequently don't need it) I consider it to be a huge waste of space.

Indexing Service: Would be usefull if you have a copy of MS office that makes use of the indexing service, but it's completely useless if you don't have an app that makes use of the Indexing Servce. disabled by deafult, but you may have enabled it thinking it was usefull.

Automatic Updates. Periodicly checks to see if there's a new "critical" update from the MS WU/MU servers. I generaly disable it becasue I'm usualy in the loop when MS drops something new on WU/MU. You might want to keep this one unless you're a tech who's as plugged into the grapvine as I am. It's a bit of a pain, but for the average user itmay be worth it.

There's other stuff that might be doing all this, but these three are the onese I know are present on your system (all three can be disabled, Indexing Service can even be uninstalled).

Now, lets examine your system: First off, how critical an issue is this? What's the Capacity of your hard drive (or drives if you have more than one)? How much free space do you have left?

nickster_uk

Do you use a program called BootVis?

If yes, have a look in:

C:\WINDOWS\System32\LogFiles\WMI

If you see a file called trace.log, then there's a chance it may be of a ridiculous size. To resolve, start BootVis, click the Trace tab and then select Stop Tracing.

If that doesn't resolve it, open the registry and navigate to this key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\WMI\GlobalLogger\

Double click the binary value 'Start' and set it to 0

Reboot and you should be sorted :-)

mr_lemon

Thanks for all the advice, but so far:
- Cleanup only frees a few megabytes
- There are no malicious or suspicious pieces of software on my computer
- Ive run Ad-aware and Spybot, and my computer is clean
- I dont have Bootvis
- Indexing is off

Computer Specs:
Amd Athlon Xp 2000 1.6ghz
512MB Ram
C Drive: 9.75GB total, 162MB (currently) avaliable
D Drive: 19.5GB total, 2.55GB avaliable
E Drive: 26.5GB total, 3.76GB avaliable
Geforce MX440 64 MB Graphics card
Norton Antivirus 2005 is installed

hold on im testing some more things brb

mr_lemon

damn i have to go somewhere, i will be gone for around 4 days

mr_lemon

ok back

96MB on c drive now :/

"if that doesnt help, download the diagnostic utility from the hard drives manufacturer and test the drive"
where do i find that

nickster_uk

Did you check here for any inflated log files?:

C:\WINDOWS\System32\LogFiles\WMI

You can obtain diagnostic software from the manafacturer of the hard drive itself.

We need to find out where this space is disappearing too though and quickly...please can you right click on the following folders on your C Drive and let me know their individual sizes please?:

C:\WINDOWS
C:\Documents And Settings
C:\Program Files

Also...do you have your page file and hibernate file on your C Drive? You will need to change the folder view to show protected operating system files to find this out. If you see them there, you can disable hibernation by right clicking an empty space on your desktop then selecting Properties then the ScreenSaver tab. Click the Power button and then the Hibernate tab - remove the tick from the box and click Apply then OK. This should free some space instantly and can be renabled once we have sorted the problem if you want to use hibernate. You can also move the page file to a different partition (it is recommended to be on a non-active partition for performance reasons). You can do this by right clicking My Computer and selecting Properties then Advanced. Click the Settings button under Performance and then click the Advanced tab. Under Virtual Memory, click Change and make the required changes....you will need to reboot for this to take effect but doing so will free up some more space.

mr_lemon

C:\WINDOWS 3.19 GB (3,426,361,344 bytes)
C:\Documents And Settings 3.82 GB (4,112,023,552 bytes)
C:\Program Files 832 MB (872,824,832 bytes)

Most of the programs I install are installed in the F and E drives, so thats why the program files folder is so small

C:\WINDOWS\System32\LogFiles\WMI <-- no such directory


About virtual memory:
Currently -

Do i put the exact same settings onto another drive and stop it on C drive?



Edit: OMG i unclicked hibernate and my disk space jumped from 90MB to 600MB instantly, thanks, system stable for now

nickster_uk

Yep, just put the same values on your other hard drive/partition - reboot and you will save another 768mb's.

As for the problem, it seems to be inside Documents and Settings so the best thing you can do is right click on the folders inside there and see which one is biggest...once you find it, open the folder and repeat the process till you find the problem file.

Once you have found it, report back here on the name of the file and we'll advise from there :-)

mr_lemon

The problem is, this leads to my music folder, which is naturally large, and I havnt added or modified any new files in it for a while.

C:\Documents and Settings\Jimmy\My Documents\My Music

nickster_uk

Ok...we're getting somewhere and should be able to sort this soon :-)

All you need to do now is have a look through that folder for large files and/or multiples or small/medium files. Would be advisable to show hidden files/folders etc and also show protected files.

mr_lemon

Done, nothing unusual

nickster_uk

Seems kinda odd having 3.8GB's in Documents & Settings?? I have 400mb's in mine which covers 3 profiles.

Is space still being eaten up slowly?

mr_lemon

I dont know if this means anything but:



Is Google Desktop supposed to make all these big files?


And I havnt been losing space recently, weird. The large size of my Documents and settings folder comes from a lot of music which I copy from my CDs. (im 15, trying my hardest to sound articulate on this forum because im usually not)

nickster_uk

Think you have solved this one yourself :-)

I don't know anything about Google Desktop so I just found this out:

"To install, Google Desktop requires 1 gigabyte (Gb) of space on your hard drive. Once you've installed, your personal Google Desktop index may require up to 4 additional Gb. Google Desktop's cached copies require substantially less space than the original documents, so you don't need to worry about your cache filling up too quickly or taking up large portions of your hard drive."

Seems a lotta space for one program....I know what i'd do with it

Do you copy the music in wav format or mp3? And do you have other partitions/hard drives on your PC?

mr_lemon

Ahh i missed the bit about 4GB, thanks i think its all sorted now, and ive got a lot more free space thanks to some advice from u guys, cheers

The music is mostly in mp3 format, and i have D and E drives, which are working fine

nickster_uk

Ok...the reason I asked about the format is that some CD rippers will rip cd format to WAV format which is much larger than mp3.

But as a tip, if you lower the bitrate on the ripping software, the output files will be a bit smaller than normal.

Anyway...glad it's all sorted now. If you ever need any more help, just let us know :-)

mr_lemon

thanks, will do :)