What the H**l did he do?? No more space!

Ok. We had almost 4 GB of free space on this thing, & then he was updating his mom's stupid Garmin GPS thing on our computer, & now it says there's only 1.3 GB free??? So I went & deleted anything that said Garmin on it, & only got .05 GB back. Yes, I cleaned temp files & emptied recycle bin. And he's gone for 4 days now & wouldn't probably not know what I was talking about.
Help!!
Windows XP***

 

Download and run SpaceSniffer. It's a freeware stand-alone app that doesn't require installation. It will show you what's eating up all your hard drive space and you should be able to go from there.

 

Don't just "delete" things; uninstall them properly.

 

Most likely not related to whoever you are ranting about, for the space disappearing. Really helps that instead of jumping up on a soapbox and leaving a bunch of holes in your story, you really should start from the beginning, then include the middle which you did, and then an end as in what are you wanting us to help you with.

It is like walking into the bank and stating out loud "I am ready to take someone out!".

 

I don't know what happened, but today it says we have 4.36 GB free. Weird. Sorry I freaked out but the sun hasn't been out for days & my brain quits working right when that happens, but I still don't understand what happened...
It's all right now.
I did uninstall it properly & it said it was only using .78 MB, so I dont' get it. The largest file I found in My Documents was only 15 MB.
Anyway, thank you to the objective people.

 

I wouldn't be too happy myself at having just 4GB free, that's far too tight for the system to operate normally whatever size the disk may be. You should be aiming to get at least 25% free space, so Space Sniffer may be a useful suggestion. I use WinDirStat myself but either will do.

 

I use this program - http://www.jam-software.com/treesize_free/

See if "Windows Old" is listed.
If it is, it can take up a large amount of space.
Move it to a different hdd.
You need much more than 4gb of space.

 

We are all in agreement about 4GB of available space being far too little. Just curious though — I was taught to not go over 50% of the HD's capacity, yet I've seen two recent posts about not going over 75%. Don't things slow down noticeably at that level?

 

You may want to try a tool like CCleaner to clean up some space on your computer.

 

Maybe it's only me on this, but I have a policy of keeping usage on a drive below 40%. Once the drive hits 25%, I really start thinking of a larger drive. I have found that everything runs best this way...

 

What geeks "recommend" and what normal people have for free space are usually vastly different.

 

Totally agree.
I keep my hdds at about 75% and my comp is always running smoothly.

Some geeks just like respond to everything.

 

The low space thing has to do with defragging, the more free space you have the easier it is for a system to move things around, but if a system is workign with low disk space, then theres no need to delete stuff of just buy a bigger hard drive.

 

Advising most 'normal people' 'just to buy a bigger drive' is like advising them it's best just to write their own drive compression software :-D

 

You are saying that if you have a 1TB drive, to just use 350gb of it, or if it hits 750gb, then it is time to get a new drive? Gee, I wish I had your money to go out and buy new drives all the time.

I have only 1.2gb in use right now on a 2TB mirrored Raid1 NAS, 40GB in use on a 1TB USB drive connected to a USB Network interface, and then I have 31GB in use on a 240GB drive on my notebook.

So now you are saying that I have to go out and keep getting larger drives for no reason. This is what NAS units are made for, and also the use of going through and deleting old material that has not been accessed for years, or in the likes of Tax documents, 7 years is the longest a copy should be kept, along with the hard copy on paper.

Drives may be getting cheaper, but SSD's went back up, which are causing platter drives to stay where they have been for the past 4-6 months.

No, what the OP needs to do, is run the utility stated in post #2 and figure out what is eating up space.

 

It had always been my experience that once you got much over 50% of a harddrive under Win98, Win2000, and to a lesser extent WinXP, things would start to slow down a bit. I have not used Win7 long enough to see if decreasing free space has any growing impact on performance.

I cannot explain the reason performance degrades, nor have I kept any data logs for research purposes, so this is just my opinion, based on over 16 years of personal observations working with computers. I tend to keep my drives fairly clear of file debris . . . especially the OS drive . . . and like brownizs mentioned a NAS is a must have for offloading files you want to keep but not have cluttering up your working drive.

Almost from the beginning I have used two separate drives in my builds . . . one for the OS and the other for files and a large paging file, so my OS drives rarely gets much over 60% full at any rate.

 

Both [MG] WinDirStat and SpaceSniffer can be very helpful with finding space hogs.
I have used both. SpaceSniffer is stand-alone and does not need installation.

I also recommend [MG] Wise Disk Cleaner

Also check the system restore settings in case the disk space allocation was increased or set to maximum.

Also the pagefile size setting and set to system managed.

If Hibernation had previously been Disabled and is now Enabled, the hiberfile.sys file will be as large as your system RAM.
Disable Hibernation and that file will be deleted.

 

Hey, Brownizs...

Not exactly. I have 2 250 GB drives, one at about 40% usage and another at about 29% and then a 120 GB drive at about 17%. I have noticed that when I get over 45%, performance degrades on a main drive. I have been chalking it up to the drive arm needing more revolutions to find things as the data expands in and out toward the edges of the disk when it is fuller. I don't know exactly what is the reason, but that was the best I could come up with.

I guess I made it sound like I just pick up and buy drives left and right, but it's more just something I am convinced of. I like your RAID setup. Hoping I can get something like that set up at some point when I have the opportunity to get some larger drives and an external drive container...Just an upgrade that I need to make asap...

 

You are seeing the Placebo affect. Just because the drive is 40% filled, is not going to slow it down. Now of course, the operating system, if you have not changed Pre-Fetch & Superfetch on Win7 & Win8, those two will slow things down, along with indexing.

Your problem is not with the amount of data, it is how you are going about not making sure the system is running at best performance. First thing I did, when I got my new machine, was turn off Pre & super fetch, due to we are running at 12gb of RAM. Still have not decided to turn off pagefile on it, because it has been debated as to whether or not it makes a difference, especially when you have it set for system managed.

I have found that if you do not do a regular Optimize/defrag and diskcleanup, yes you will have issues with machines.

 

I use a small HD for my OS there is really no need to go above 120gigs of HD space for a OS.You can even have a Dual Boot system on a 120 gig and still have room to spare.

What it comes down too is the op needs to run threw the OS and clean out the system.

And probably buy a extra big drive or flash stick that can fit the extra stuff on it.

I have a 120gig flash stick for back up / videos and music and 32gb for like programs and different software.

And a internal 120 gb drive for extra storage.If you keep stuff like music and videos off of your main drive it will greatly increase your main HD speed and give it room.

 

The best thing, is that you can now pick up the Lenovo ix2 2TB model for less then $225 through Tigerdirect.com, which I just did this week. It is mirrored Raid1, since I use it for IP camera storage, so I am not worried about really running out of space at a 1TB mirror.

If I ever need more, I can pop the 1TB units out and plug in 3TB if I really need 3TB Raid1 Mirrored storage for the cameras.

 

Yeah, pop out the 1 TB units which are raid 1, and pop in two NEW ones at 3 TB? That is not simply done. heh.

 

It is if the person doing it, knows what they are doing, when they swap out the drives. So what is your point.