Hard Drive (almost) Full?

[Blade Ryan]

I have a 4-year-old Gateway notebook, 2.2 GHz processor, 40 GB internal hard drive, running Windows XP Home. I have it networked with 2 other notebooks (both also running XP Home), and the Gateway notebook isn't used very much, although I have two printers connected to it.

Yesterday, after I couldn't get anything to print from one of the other notebooks, I checked out the Gateway for problems. I immediately noticed a warning box that the C: drive was almost full, so I checked it out and found that all 37+ GB of the C: drive was showing as "Used Space" with only a few KB of "Free Space" remaining. I don't have very many applications loaded onto this computer, so I went to Windows Explorer and manually added up the amount of GB used by each folder on the C: drive. The 12 or so folders showing on the C: Drive added up to about 4.6 GB of space used. By contrast, one of the other networked notebooks, which also has a 40GB Hard Drive but a lot more data and applications loaded, only uses 12 GB of the drive.

Since yesterday, I have performed a Disk Cleanup and a disk Defrag, removed the approx 1.5 GB of files from the My Documents Folder, enabled drive compression, downloaded Webroot Windows Washer and run it, performed a CHKDISK, deleted all of the system restore points and reduced the allowable system restore space, and I've managed to get 4GB or so of free space. However, the drive is still showing 32 GB of used space, which just doesn't seem right. I do not have the drive partitioned (that i know of). I should also add that this is a warranty replacement hard drive from Gateway that I installed about a year ago after the original developmed problems, but it has operated error-free since I've had it.

Anyone have any ideas? Thanks!

[glc]

Open a command prompt and type:

chkdsk /f

Answer Y to all prompts and reboot.

[Blade Ryan]

glc,

Thanks for the reply. I did and that didn't fix it.

However, I took another look at the Folder Options in Windows Explorer. I enabled display of protected system files, and when I did, I found 28.2 GB in two folders which had to do with my AOL spyware protection. One file was 22 GB alone! I don't know where that came from, but I uninstalled the AOL spyware and deleted the files in question, and sure enough, it freed up all that disk space. I'm having to reihnstall the AOL spyware, firewall, etc, but at least I figured out where the disk space was being taken up.

Thanks again for your reply!

Blade Ryan

[YukonMaster]

Wow I wonder why AOL was taking up the much space?

[Blade Ryan]

I don't know why AOL was taking up that much space. I run the same AOL spyware, virus and firewall on two other notebooks and neither has developed such large anti-spyware files.

[glc]

The sooner you get away from AOL the better off you will be. Their software is total bloat and not very effective.