Memory Disappears??

pory39 · Apr 5, 2007

Try to give short story. 40gig hard drive on a 4 yr old pc. I ran out of memory so saved 3gigs of personal photos/videos (had 4 yrs worth saved) to discs and deleted.

That 3gigs slowly went bye-bye, maybe took a week. I then got rid of another 1gig. That 1gig lasted 3-4 days. I deleted 280mbs 48 hours ago. I now have 173mbs.

I use AOL (please, no lectures lol) and Int Explorer. I use McAfee thru AOL and AdAware. They both are kept up to date.

I have deleted my Temp Int Files. I cannot defrag as not enough avl space. I have looked through AOL Settings and see no problems. Only thing I can figure is some virus/malware that McAfee does not/cannot catch?

Any ideas or suggestions?? thanks much

p.s. Am shopping for new, state-of-art pc, but would like to solve this problem meanwhile.

chaslang · Apr 6, 2007

Welcome to Major Geeks!

First and educational comment. You ran out of hard disk space not memory. They are not the same thing. Memory is RAM.

Sounds like you may have a utility that store backups. Do you know whether you have an software like that on your PC. I remember having a few people come here in the past with issues like this and they had software that creates backups in hidden folders or disk partitions and they didn't even know it. It came with the PCs.

That being said! This is the malware forum. If you expect that you may have malware issues then follow the below steps.

Please follow our standard cleaning procedures which are necessary for us to provide you support. Also there are steps included for installing, renaming, running, and posting HijackThis logs as attachments.

Run ALL the steps in this Sticky thread READ & RUN ME FIRST Before Asking for Support

Make sure you check version numbers and get all updates.

Very Important: Make sure you tell us the results from running the tutorial...was anything found? Were you unable to complete any of the scans?...Were you unable to download any of the tools?...Did you do the on-line scans as suggested? etc.

After doing ALL of the above you still have a problem make sure you have booted to normal mode and run the steps in the below link to properly use HijackThis and attach a log:

Downloading, Installing, and Running HijackThis
Make sure you also rename HijackThis.exe as suggested in the procedures. Use analyse.exe for the new name. This is very important due to some new infections going around.

When you return to make your next post, make sure you attach the following logs and that you have run these scans in the following order too:

CounterSpy - only for Windows XP, 2K, & NT users

AVG Antispyware log - ONLY IF NEEDED you were not able to run CounterSpy. - only for Windows XP, 2K, & NT users

Bitdefender - from step 6

Panda Scan - from step 6

runkeys.txt - the log from GetRunKey.bat

newfiles.txt - the log from ShowNew.bat

HijackThis

NOTE: You can only attach 3 files in a single message so it will require that you use two messages to attach all of these logs!

pory39 said: ↑

Try to give short story. 40gig hard drive on a 4 yr old pc. I ran out of memory so saved 3gigs of personal photos/videos (had 4 yrs worth saved) to discs and deleted.

That 3gigs slowly went bye-bye, maybe took a week. I then got rid of another 1gig. That 1gig lasted 3-4 days. I deleted 280mbs 48 hours ago. I now have 173mbs.

I use AOL (please, no lectures lol) and Int Explorer. I use McAfee thru AOL and AdAware. They both are kept up to date.

I have deleted my Temp Int Files. I cannot defrag as not enough avl space. I have looked through AOL Settings and see no problems. Only thing I can figure is some virus/malware that McAfee does not/cannot catch?

Any ideas or suggestions?? thanks much

p.s. Am shopping for new, state-of-art pc, but would like to solve this problem meanwhile.
Click to expand...

Log in or Sign up

Memory Disappears??

pory39 Private E-2

chaslang MajorGeeks Admin - Master Malware Expert Staff Member