Loosing Harddrive Space

[mrstuff68]

In the past 2 weeks I have noticed that I am loosing harddrive space for no apparent reason. I have been noticing that my harddrive space has been lessening by the day. For the past couple of days I have been watching it and have lost between 2-25mb a day. And I can seem to figure out what is actually eating this up. I ran several spy software finders, with no results, I ran AntiVirus, Scan disked my drive and Defragmented, to no avail. I know that there must be something creating bogus files on my system but cant really find the program or the files, just yet. Also since I am going low on space I am trying to delete some files to make room, I have hard-deleted about 80mb of .bmp's and that didnt reflect on my harddrive space, it didnt go up, which really surprised me. I also moved about 200mb of .mp3's and that didnt reflect on my hd space either. But then when I went into my Temp folder and deleted like 60mb of junk, that did reflect in my hd space. I streatching for straws no, I need help.

If anyone has any ideas of what could be going on and what I can do to fix it, I would really appreciate some guidance.

Thanks to all that reply.

[Pc_Madness]

You can try emptying this folder, it usually contains a heap of unused files, like backups of extracted zip files and installer stuff. (Don't delete the Cookies or History folders, and it may raise errors about not being allowed to delete some files, so just leave those)

XP
C:\Documents and Settings\#Username#\Local Settings\Temp

Win9x
C:\Windows\Temp
I'm not a 100% on that one.

You can also check that its not just Temporary Internet Files that is growing. Open up Internet Options and check the size of Temporary Internet Files, I have it set to 200mb. If you decide to set it too 200 as well, make sure you empty it as well.

Hope that helps.

[mrstuff68]

Ok, that sounds like a good idea, now it looks like that folder has a lot of junk in it at least 100mb. I cleared it out and those files got deleted but it doesnt seem like my HD space is increasing it should have at least went up by 50mb. Would updating windows have anything to do with this? I havent updated my windows for several months now, let me try that and I will see what that gets me.

Thanks

[Pc_Madness]

It shouldn't be anything to do with Windows not being updated...

Try doing something like this,

Keep a log over two to 3 days of the file size for,
-C:\Windows
-C:\Program Files\
-C:\Documents and Settings\Username (or C:\Windows\Profiles I think it is in Win9x)
-Any other folder in C:\ that you think you should look at.
-The Harddrive itself

And see what changes. Maybe you should consider reinstalling Windows, give it a fresh start.


Just thinking, are you running any kind of Firewall? ZoneAlarm used to make huge logs for me, getting up into the 100's of mb over a few months.

[mrstuff68]

Well I have downloaded every possible update that I could get my hands on. It seems like that might have helped a bit, cause after I restarted so the updates go into affect, then when I went to see how much I had in my HD, and it muraculously was 250mb more than before. So that releaved me a bit, but I have also found the other culprit, ZoneAlarm, it has 800mb of log files in there. I deleted most of the outdated logs, and this has really improved my HD space.

Thanks for the suggestion.