Hi I have a question that I don't know if there is answer to. Basically my original memory on my hd is 250gb. I had to wipe my hd twice in the past year and a half. First time I had to wipe it was because I was doing a system restore and there was a power failure and it messed everything up. I did manage to save a back up. Second time I had some sort of a virus that wouldn't allow me to do a system restore at all, just kept sayin "restore unsucessful". Anyway, when I hit properties on the first back up folder is says the size is 11.9gb, the second back up folder says 56.9 gb but when I hit properties on my c drive it say the remaining size left on my pc is a misely 3.8 gb. Can anyone tell me where the rest of this space is gone or can it be retrieved before I buy another hd? Thanks Sandisk
do properties on all your folders individually to which 1 is using up the space as you might have spyware. have a customer with 40gig hd that had a folder from hotbar full of shoppers reports & not hers. that folder was 32.5gigs plus windows & other pograms left her with 4megs of space free. found the folder & deleted it.
Ok thanks ddp, I'll go through that after work and I'll let you know. I use spyware doctor and xoftspy at the minute for scanning, I'm clear according to them. Could the spyware still have crept through?
Yeh that would probally be the best thing to do, you'll probally end up finding some strange folder sitting there taking up huge ammounts of hd space. Theres some more things to try as windows is a b***ch and leaves crap everywhere, when I've encountered stuff like this, first thing I'd do is look in the obvious places. Browse your HD for stuff you dont need and remove them, you'll find some crap sitting in C:/program files that stays there after being uninstalled, takes space. Remove un needed stuff in controll panel add or remove programs. System restore takes alot of space, by default it can take up to 12% of your HD space I think, Controll panell > performance and maintanence > system > system restore, put a check in disable system restore, click apply and wait, all data backed up on system restore will be removed, restart and re enable system restore. Dump all your prefetch C:\WINDOWS\Prefetch, something like ATF cleaner does a good job of that also: http://www.atribune.org/content/view/19/2/ See how much that can remove, you will be surprised. Run a Trend micro anti virus scan: http://housecall.trendmicro.com/ Defrag your HD, Start > All programs > Accesories > System Tools > Disk Defragmenter. Fonts can take up to a gb and you can add all your music to a compressed format.
download & run ccleaner from this link as it cleans the crap out of windows. cleaned almost 2gig off a customer's hd once. http://www.ccleaner.com/
Hi, yes I've done most of that and recovered about 4gb of hd space. Can I clear all of ch C:\WINDOWS\Prefeton both my backed up folders keeping just my C:\WINDOWS\Prefetch folder ? Also this is bugging me too. Last night I was just going thriugh my internet options and in there when I hit the CONTENT tab, and then certificates and then " intermediate certification authorities", there is a whole bunch of stuff like, Root Agencie issued by Root agencie BY Root Agencie and VeriSign class 1 CA, also Microsoft windows. Then in next tab beside that which is " Trusted Root certification Authorities" there is lots more stuff like ABA. ECOM root CA, Belacom E-trust p... and lots more. In the trusted publishers tab beside that, there is nothing in that one and finally in the tab next to that one which is "untrusted publishers" it says' issued to microsoft corp by VeriSign commercial. Are these certificates harmful?? Thanks
just info,but i sure as hell read it One more time: do not clean out your Prefetch folder! Yet another Web site posted yet another “tip” today recommending that you clean out your Prefetch folder to improve performance of Windows. Arrrggghhh! I’ve written about this repeatedly (here and here and here, for instance), but the message doesn’t seem to be spreading very fast. Maybe this quote from “Misinformation and the Prefetch Flag” by Ryan Myers, a developer on Microsoft’s Windows Client Performance Team, will help: XP systems have a Prefetch directory underneath the windows root directory, full of .pf files — these are lists of pages to load. The file names are generated from hashing the EXE to load — whenever you load the EXE, we hash, see if there’s a matching (exename)-(hash).pf file in the prefetch directory, and if so we load those pages. (If it doesn’t exist, we track what pages it loads, create that file, and pick a handful of them to save to it.) So, first off, it is a bad idea to periodically clean out that folder as some tech sites suggest. For one thing, XP will just re-create that data anyways; secondly, it trims the files anyways if there’s ever more than 128 of them so that it doesn’t needlessly consume space. So not only is deleting the directory totally unnecessary, but you’re also putting a temporary dent in your PC’s performance. [emphasis in original] Bottom line: You will not improve Windows performance by cleaning out the Prefetch folder. You will, in fact, degrade Windows performance by cleaning out the Prefetch folder. I’ve done performance testing that establishes this definitively. In all the many sites that offer this bogus tip, I have yet to see a single piece of actual performance testing. Oh, and for anyone who cites this TechRepublic article as a source, let me just say that it contains more serious factual errors than I can count. For instance: As you boot your workstation or access programs on your workstation, XP’s prefetcher copies portions of those files to the Prefetch area of your hard drive. That’s completely wrong. The files in the Prefetch folder contain lists of pages that that should be loaded when a program starts. Each file is essentially an index. Windows XP doesn’t copy portions of any files to the Prefetch folder. When your workstation boots, XP prefetches portions of the files you use most frequently and has any application you’ve recently run waiting and ready to go. This is equally absurd. If this were true, it would mean that Windows was actually loading into memory every program you’ve ever used, every time you start Windows. That’s not the way it works at all. When your PC starts up, Windows looks in the Prefetch folder to determine how best to load Windows. It doesn’t do a thing with the .pf files for applications (unless, of course, you’ve configured one of those apps to start up with Windows). If you’re frequently using the same few applications over and over again, prefetching can greatly increase the apparent speed of a system. Rather than waiting for you to click an icon to start a program, and then loading all of the associated files, libraries, and pointers necessary to run the program, XP has all the components of your programs preloaded. When you click an icon to start the program, most of the hard work is already done. The author just made this up. The .pf files don’t get used at all until you run a program. What actually happens when you click an icon is that Windows uses the information in the Prefetch folder to decide which program segments to load and in what order to load those pages. There’s plenty of documentation for this, including Ryan Myers’ article and this definitive article by Mark Russinovitch and David Solomon, Windows XP Kernel Improvements Create a More Robust, Powerful, and Scalable OS. The drawback to prefetching is that XP will prefetch a program even if you use it only once or twice. XP will retain a copy of a portion of it in the Prefetch folder. From there, it will prefetch the program, taking resources from your workstation even though you may have no intention of ever using the program again. Again, the author just pulled this out of who-knows-where. When you run a program, Windows creates a .pf file for it in the Prefetch folder. When you run the program again, Windows looks for this .pf file and uses it to determine how to load the program. The hash doesn’t contain any portion of the original program code. If you never run the program again, that .pf file never gets used, and in fact it gets deleted eventually. I used to write for TechRepublic. I’ve tried to contact someone there to get them to correct this silly article but have yet to receive a response. It would be really, really great if some of the other sites that have propagated this urban legend would also correct it. http://www.edbott.com/weblog/?p=743
Ok, I've read the info. I've checked all folders. My pc seems to be clean. Strange how all that space has gone missing though! I'll buy an external hd. Thanks for the Info guys!
Do you have Norton SystemWorks or other norton virus installed that has a "protected" recycle bin? If you do, then you will have to right click on the recycle bin and select Purge Files.. or something similar. I can't remember the exact text.
I had got norton, but not any more, I uninstalled it after my subscription was over. I also deleted all the remaining folders it left after the un-install.
my last go at this,get this program and run it..i know guys that use this to find large system files. cheers What is a Treemap? The treemap represents each file as a colored rectangle, the area of which is proportional to the file's size. The rectangles are arranged in such a way, that directories again make up rectangles, which contain all their files and subdirectories. So their area is proportional to the size of the subtrees. The color of a rectangle indicates the type of the file, as shown in the extension list. The cushion shading additionally brings out the directory structure. Treemaps were invented by Ben Shneiderman (www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/treemap-history). WinDirStat is a disk usage statistics viewer and cleanup tool for Microsoft Windows (all current variants). Release Notes The version 1.1.2 has been released on 2005-07-16. Users may want to have a look at the release notes. A re-release of version 1.1.2 bundled as an installer is now (2005-12-11) available. Although the installer file is smaller than the each of the other two binary packages, it contains both Ansi and Unicode binary files. The installer will care for creation of shortcuts as well as for later removal from the "Add or Remove Programs" entry. If you run in one of the supported locales, the installer will automatically pre-select your language by default. Warning: the installer is considered still BETA! Please report any issues. Note: the installer may not work on the very first edition of Windows 95. All Windows 95 users please provide us with feedback on that issue. Features WinDirStat reads the whole directory tree once and then presents it in three useful views: * The directory list, which resembles the tree view of the Windows Explorer but is sorted by file/subtree size, * The treemap, which shows the whole contents of the directory tree straight away, * The extension list, which serves as a legend and shows statistics about the file types. * For all tastes of Windows: WinDirStat 1.1.2 Setup (Ansi & Unicode) (~620 kB) * For Windows NT 4.0, 2000, XP, 2003: WinDirStat 1.1.2 Executables (Unicode) (730 kB) * For Windows 95, 98 and ME: WinDirStat 1.1.2 Executables (Ansi) (726 kB) * For older releases, as well as their source code, have a look at the Project File List go here and get it http://windirstat.sourceforge.net/
Hi, I am a noob when it comes to this part of the pc. But after running that. It says my C: as 98.3 percent of space taken up with 109.2 gb and my D: at 1.7 percent with 1.9gb = total of 111 gb. originally my hd was 250gb.
i have not used the program,so i am limited with help for you.. WinDirStat is a disk usage statistics viewer and cleanup tool for MS Windows (all current variants). It shows disk, file and directory sizes in a treelist as well as graphically in a treemap, much like KDirStat and SequoiaView. http://sourceforge.net/projects/windirstat/
Yes, it shows files as you say and it also shows what size each file and folder is. But the total of everything is 111gb. That seems to be the capacity of my hd. There is over 100gb missing from my hd? Must say, that is a good tool though. Thanks
Hi, it shows total size 229gb, free space 5.3gb. When I purchesed it last year, total size was 250gb. Im running on windows xp home edition, service pack 2.
with the tool WinDirStat, that shows the total size for my computer as 111gb. I do have a lot of movie clips and vob files and that takes up a lot of the space. Still a helluva lot of space missing though!
