WHered the space go.

[jimmyrules712]

I know this is a stretch but i want to try to make it work. Friend has a computer system, 900 mhz athlon cpu, 256 meg of Ram, and a 3.5 gig HD. Wants me to put XP on it. So i did, well now ive installed xp, done all the updates, and out of the 3.5 gig HD, only 600 megabytes is free. So im looking at the files in Explorer, and it shows 500 meg under program files, and 1.2 gig under windows files, and thats it, it doesnt account for like half of the used HD. I did disk cleanup, disk defragment. Is there a way to free up this space that is seemingly being used by nothing? I also turned off system restore and system indexing.

[Confused]

Unaccounted space is hidden files. 3.5G is not near enough space for XP. I would recommend 8G minimum. I run 10G just for XP, SP1, updates and drivers.
Chas

[jimmyrules712]

i dont believe that those 2 gig of hidden files are necesary or being used, and ive got XP running on a different old computer with a 4.5 gig HD and its got all updates as well as programs and still has 1 gig free. From what ive seen, yes XP will easily gobble up 10 gig if you allow it to, but it can also be contained within a couple gig if you make it, im just trying to see if i can get rid of these big hidden files.

[jimmyrules712]

problem solved for now, key thing my friends is disk compression, so after compressing it, defraging it, cleaning it up, etc. Ive done the impossible and reduced windows XP with drivers and Updates to 1.49 gig, thanks for your time.

[glc]

With compression, that machine is gonna run slow. Hard drives are SO cheap these days, why not just get a bigger drive? Worst case, that motherboard would probably have a 32gb bios limitation, so throw a 20 or 30 gig in.

[jimmyrules712]

money is just a major issue, i dont have more then 10 bucks that i can put into it, and also for this situation, 5 gig is about all it needs.