Quickly Losing Space on the C: after Installing XP Home SP2

[Wildnites]

I just reinstalled XPHome/SP2 with all the updates, bells, whistles, Firewall back onto the 8gig partition and now XP is informing me that I only have 200Meg available on C: I have installed a few other programs like Epson SmartPanel for my Scanner, the necessary drivers for my devices/peripherals (nothing elaborate), AntiVirus, realplayer, deleted all emails. What could be filling up my HDD so fast?!? Could this be a worm or some type of backdoor virus? Swapfile? I'm baffled.

Thank you Ob1 & Macko for your advice last week!

[rcvalencia9]

An updated Windows takes at least 3.5 GB. If you have 1 gig of RAM your swap file is 1.5 GB by default. Thats already 5 GB. And at the same time if system restore is ON. That's also about another 1.5 GB. Thats give you 6.5 GB. And other programs takes some of the space. So its just normal. You should resize your partition to at least 15 GB for your main partition.

[Wildnites]

Hey thanks! What's a good program to resize the partition? Partition magic or something like that? Is there a MS utility for this?

[Statica]

Partition magic is the de facto standard for reliable resizing. There is no equivalent s/w from MS

[rcvalencia9]

Partition Magic is the best utility for resizing/creating/deleting partitions just as Statica have said. Its just easy. Just follow the steps carefully and correctly.

[copyright_1978]

Acronis Partition Expert is cheaper and easier to use. Not as fancy as PM as well.

[theENiGMA]

Just FYI, to free up some more room, you could turn system restore down to its minimum (usually 200 MB), and you can also make your recyclling bin smaller. I do these by default, b/c I never use system restore, but I keep it on just in case.
-KEiTH

[Negeva]

These links give some info on cleaning up after installing SP2 - read before proceeding.

http://aumha.org/win5/a/sp2faq.php#after
http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthr...ight=sp2+bloat