Overloaded C drive

Hi All,

I have a relative on the other side of the Atlantic who asked me to help her with a problem she is having. Her C drive is filling up, (her PC was partitioned into 4 drives, by the person who set her up. Now the C drive is acting up as there is not enough space left.) and she sent me this in reply to a query.

"My C drive is driving me completely bonkers. It keeps going down each day.
> What are the "temporary files" not the temporary internet files but just the
> plain "temporary files".
In my program files: Adobe, Ahead, ATI Technologies, AvRack, Common Files,
> ComPlus Applications, DivX, Internet Explorer, Messenger, Microsoft
> ActiveSync, Microsoft AutoRoute, microsoft frontpage (which is 0 bytes...
> why do I even have it??), Microsoft Office, Microsoft Visual Studio, Movie
> Maker, MSN, MSN Gaming Zone, MSN Messenger, NetMeeting, Online Services,
> Outlook Express, Project1, Realtek Sound Manager, VIA Technologies Inc,
> Windows Media Player, Windows NT, xerox (another 0 bytes), Zone Labs"


I replied with this:

"Temporary files are those created by programmes (like WORD) to help the computer keep track of what you are doing. Once you save something, the temporary file is useless. Do a search for files that are called *.tmp and see how many are in your C drive. You can delete any that are older than a couple of days. (Do not remove them from your Recycle bin for a couple of days just in case)

Look for the records kept of your MSN conversations. They will be in the C drive, probably, and can be moved, if you want to keep them, or deleted

Type this, no quotes, exactly, into notepad "del c:\windows\prefetch\*.* /q" and save it as "deleteprefetch.bat"

Save it to your desktop, or somewhere you can find it easily. Then double click on it. It should do something real quick with a dos screen, and then quit. Let me know what it does.

Make sure you have no media files in your C drive. All movies and music can be moved elsewhere.(that is, your movies and music. Don't move windows sound files or anything you didn't download.)

If this lot does not help, we will move some programs, like Zone Alarm, to another drive."

My first question is, Is what I told her ok?

second, is there anything else I can tell her to do that will help free up some space on her C drive?

Thanks a lot to all who reply

 

Thats some good advice from Robo there on System Restore if your relative is using SR you can move the slider across so it uses less hard drive space to store the back-up points, you can also right click the recycle bin and select properties and go to the C drive tab and move this slider to a smaller amount of reserved space for deleted files

Also if your relative has the cds for things like Office, autoroute etc rather than being pre-installed you could move these to a seperate partition

 

Along the same lines, Internet Explorer reserves a lot of space for temporary internet files; it reserves a percentage of the drive, and on a large drive may be wasting gigabytes of space. that can be adjusted to MUCH more modest levels. Same for the Recycle Bin.

And she should be installing at least SOME of her programs to those secondary partitions. Easiest way to do that is to create a folder on the D: drive (or E:, or whatever) called "Program Files", then during installation simply change C :\Program Files\yadda yadda to D :\Program Files\yadda yadda, to make parking them on the second drive simple and keep the folders organized properly.

 

For disk cleaners, why not try one from here: http://www.majorgeeks.com/downloads12.html

I've used HDCleaner.

Another possibility is Spyware or Adware rubbish that has accumulated then you can use: http://www.majorgeeks.com/vb/showthread.php?t=25834

 

Getting rid of the crap on your drives

Sorry, should read Cleanup! Baz

===========
MrPewty,
Link on previous post gives you lots of choices.
My favourite I use after every session on the net is Cleeanup! (with an exclamation mark) from http://www.stevengould.org/

Steven Gould is the author, program is free.

I ran it on a friends pc that had never been cleaned up after using the net. Cleanup! deleted 60,505 files. I couldn't believe it. I thought something was wrong.
On my own sessions on the net I have accumulated 1720 junk entries, 6.5mb in a 3 hour session. Another was 575 files, 1.9mb in an hour. This is in spite of running it after every session on the net.

It is free, extremely simple to use. You have the option of rebooting straight away after finished running Cleanup (deletes INDEX.DAT and others that cannot be removed immediately) or declining to reboot immediately. I usually answer NO and the dross is removed next time I bootup. Hope this of assistance. Baz

==========

 

Sorry People, I forgot to include the OS.

She is using XP home.

I will advise her of all the tips you all suggested, and thanks very much.

I'm at work right now, so I can't be on long. I'll be on again later with some questions regarding the advice.

Thanks again

 

I notice it's possible to put the Temporary Internet Files folder on another drive. Will this slow down the Browser(IE)?

 

How would one move the Swap file Robo? I should imagine that would free up some space on C:

Thanks

 

Thanks a lot Robo, I appreciate the help.

 

Kinda on the same topic, but moving the swap file to a different drive helps performance, but would just putting it on a different partition help perfomance at all? I wouldn't think so but I'm just curious and trying to learn.