10+gigs of wasted space on my computer?

[Stephen G.]

I have windows ME and a 20 gig hard drive that's at 12.8 gigs right now. I ran the maintenace wizard, which, I guess, scans for errors and defrags the hard drive. After that I'm left with 2.11 gigs on the hard drive. So I come home from work the next day, and it's right back up to 12.8 gigs, I went through this a couple times and don't know what could be wrong. Now, my girlfriend saw all that used memory (before I ran that first defrag) and just started deating all sorts of stuff all over the place to free up space. Could we have lost some important files and that's causing the problem? Insight from any of you wonderful people would be greatly apprieciated. Thanks

[Cricket]

Hi Stephen G.,

There are several things happening on your PC (none of which are actual problems).

The first thing is Virtual Memory or the Windows Swap File. This is space set aside on your hard drive by Windows for it's own use. It uses this hard drive space like RAM to store information it's working on. It sort of depends on how much physical RAM you have (the more actual RAM, the less Windows will go to the swap file), but WinME is a little more aggressive (greedy?) when it comes to setting aside this hard drive space for Virtual Memory. The bigger the drive, the more space it "sees" it can use for itself. The swap file size is dynamic...it will grow or shrink as Windows sees fit. There are several tricks you can use to limit this, but it's a good idea to let Windows manage memory on it's own.

The second thing is the Restore feature that is built into WinME. I'm not familiar with this feature as I'm still using Win98SE, but I heard it can use up hard drive space pretty quickly. You may want to look into this feature a little more to get a better understanding of it. I think there's a way to turn it off, but it will leave you without the ability to Restore your system should you encounter a really bad problem. I think it's recommended that you leave it enabled.

It depends what kind of files your girlfriend deleted. If they were mostly .tmp, .bmp, .jpg type files, your system should still be fine. If she went into the Windows directory and started haphazardly deleting system files, your system probably wouldn't run. Files with .dll, .sys, .com, .inf, .ini, .dat...basically anything you're not sure of should be left alone.

If you think you may have lost some important system files, you can use the Restore feature to bring your system back to the way it was before she cleaned house.

If your system is running well now, don't worry about the used hard drive space. When it does come to the point where your drive is really full of actual data, Windows will tell you.

:) Cricket