a question on my Drive filling up!

[Thudpucker]

My PC has a 10G drive. It used to have a 'in use' portion of 2G, very large free space, and now it's free space is down to 4.1G.
I've put on a few small programs, and downloaded some stuff from the Net, but the Free space on my Hard drive has gone clear down to 2G and now is back up to 4G.

Soon I'll have my Zip drive hooked up and I'll take almost all the stuff I value off the Hard drive.

But till then...What can I do about this?
Is there a program that will look at the Hard drive and tell me if there's duplicates out there?

PS: I'm sure I know more about Goats, Electric fences and old Trucks than I do about computer software.

[Statica]

Hi Thudpucker - when you use the internet, you take up a lot of space from your hard drive in the form of temporary internet files or cache. You can reclaim this space by openning your internet explorer and going to Tools > Internet Options > and click on the Delete files button. Everything takes up space. For example, if you use Outlook Express and you have a bunch of mails in your mail folders, well that is physically stored on your hard drive as well that takes up space.
Programs take up space as well; a lot of programs create temporary files that usually never gets reclaimed unless you do it manually. One place to look is in C:\Windows\Temp .. that should have a ton of space being used, you can usually safely delete all those files within the temp directory.
Also, I see that you're using Windows 98SE. I would recommend you run a Disk Check or scan disk on your computer before you boot to Windows:
Just when it says "Starting Windows..." or before starting hitting F8. You should come with a boot menu. Select Command Prompt only (or something to that effect).
Now at the command prompt type: " scandisk C: "
And check the disk.
What usually happens on FAT32 filesystems (that Win98 uses) is that the free space on the drive is frequently misreported.
Let us know if you need further clarification on anything.

[Thudpucker]

Uh...I'll have to get back to you Stat's, that was a lot to absorb. I copied it and I'll let you know.
Amazing how much you guys know....

[Spearball]

Umm just watch out what u delete. Some cheaper programmes might delete duplicate files that windows needs..... My cousins's computer went waco because of that. He didnt want to fix the problem so he reinstalled windows. I dont know how the file could have got deleted but it happened.

[Thudpucker]

OK Stat's. I spent hours on this thing cleaning it up.
I gained about 600Meg on the disk.
Hardly noticable.
That F-8 trick was cool. That helped.
I deleted the Temp file. It was soooo full.
And cleaned up the start menu.
So Now I only have a couple of problems left.
I ran the Macaffee virus scan and AOL's version and also the scan for spywayr, and the MRU blaster, which always finds a lot of 'stuff' but I never notice any change when it cleans the stuff either.

I notice there is still something left to Kill.

When I type in this forum, and others, the PC seems to be busy and misses some of the characters I type. So I am constantly correcting errors.
The Cursor is flashing too often, and irregularly.

Maybe that one is un-trouble shootable, but it's not too bad of a problem and I can wait on it till I get my Pipes wrapped agains the cold.
See you tomorrow.

[Statica]

Personally, I would stay away from McAfee I would really use something else, there are even a few extremely reliable antivirus programs like AVG that do a better job than Macafee and yet dont consume as much resources.
The MRU blaster will always find stuff .. because that is the nature of windows and windows software. Say you play a particular music file on your media player (it doesnt even have to be Windows Media Player), the software keeps track of the most recently used files that were used to play. Same thing with something like Winzip and nearly every other program on the planet. The MRU blaster, simply, for one reason or another is used to remove those lists so that people using the computer after you dont see what you played or used. It's less to do with getting back your free space than about housekeeping.

Regarding the busy cursor flashing, it could be a variety of reasons. The forum is a bit heavy on Javascript (ads etc), it might explain a whole lot. Or it could be something on your PC that is constantly demanding attention. You could try turning off the realtime scanning of your McAfee momentarily and see if it helps. Or you may have a resource hog background program that needs to be looked into. A good way to check what's being loaded up or used is to use Hijack this and post a log of it here. please read this link before you run hijack this.
Also, I would recommend getting a second opinion with another browser for example like Firefox or opera and see how it works out. You dont need to use it permanently, but it would at least help isolate out whether your browser is behaving erratically.