Deleting a file takes FOREVER!

[Fox 3]

Hello everyone,
I've had a weird thing happen to me lately. Whenever I go to delete a file, it seriously takes a long long long time just to get the little window that says "preparing to delete". I have done a virus and spyware scan with no results. Everything else is working fine, still pretty fast at opening pages, surfing, running games, etc. only when I want to delete something my cpu (in task manager) spikes and stalls. This is happening on my #1 computer listed below.

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance

~FOX~

[kram 2.0]

How full are both your hard drives?

kram

[Fox 3]

The fullest one has 13Gb free space. I forgot to mention that I de-fragged my HDD's as well.

[Alaron]

That would mean that either the 120 is 89.1% full or the 160 is over 90% full. That is way too full for either one. Hard drives should not be more then 80% full or they slow down significantly. Try cleaning out the drives or trading up for a couple of larger drives. The 250GB+ are very affordable right now.

[Fox 3]

great, i will give that a try when i get home.

Thank you very much, I will let you know how it goes.

FOX

[Fox 3]

Ok, I just emptied out my drives, here are the new specs:

C Drive:
Total Size: 55.8 GB
Free Space: 17.3 GB
D Drive:
Total Size: 93.1 GB
Free Spce: 45.6 GB
E Drive:
Total Size:152 GB
Free Space: 86.2 GB
F Drive:
Total Size: 114 GB
Free Space: 43.6 GB

It still takes a long time to delete anything even though now they are all below the 80% mark. I have done a spyware/virus scan with no faults found.
On a seperate note, is there a way to see what is the largest folder or file on a drive? I selected the detailed view, but with folders it doesn't show the size. The problem is with some of my folders there are a lot of sub folders, so to go through them all one at a time would take forever.

Thank you for the help/ideas so far.

~FOX~

[Alaron]

Check out WinDirStat to analyze the files: http://windirstat.info/
Our review: http://www.pcmech.com/show/opensource/764

[mojo]

Try treesize, I adore it. The free version is ok, but the pro version is spectacular and also has a shell extension which gives you "folder size" column that you can enable in the details view of any directory.

[Fox 3]

awesome, thank you...I will give it a try. Any other ideas on my slow deleting problem? this also happens when I try to empty the recycle bin.

[glc]

Run chkdsk /f on all your drives, then defrag them.

[Fox 3]

Ok, the latest update...It's fixed and here is what I did.

1) uninstalled McAfee
2) installed Avast!
3) performed boot scan (avast asked me when I installed it)
4) it found 2 virus' in my system restore sector which I deleted.

after it finished booting, everything works perfect, things delete as they should now. I am not a fan of McAfee or Norton anymore, everytime I've used them they slow things down, and I'm not even convinced they do their job...after all, I did find 2 virus' using Avast.

Now, it did find something else interesting, when it scanned the file (sectors?) it found 2896 through 2903 unreadable. Is my hard drive damaged? I'm going to start a new thread I think, seems appropriate.

Anyways thank you all for your help.

~FOX~

[Fatality]

Just taking a whack at it for some help in the meantime but that might mean that there are some files on your drive that were left over and or viruses or spyware. I know you said you scanned but you never know. Have you tried Ad-Aware to scan for spyware? Like I said, just taking a whack at it.