Mystery of 13 Gigs

Hi everyone!

I'm sprucing up an old laptop for school (this place finally did it to me, I went back to school for IT rolleyes) and I was puzzling over the the fact that once I have stripped out all the pics, and other space hogs, I still have 44 G of space taken up on this computer by something.

I checked out my system folders and my programs only occupy a few G. Then, I started poking around in my files and found things like a folder (config) in my sys32 claiming to hold almost 13 G but when I opened it, most of the folders are empty and the others are fairly small.

There might be other files like this too, I've got this very bare-bones right now, I figure my actual use is probably less than 10 to 15 G.

Any thoughts?

PS: Laptop is XP, home ed.

 

Treesize is your friend

 

I've heard of treesize. Will it reclaim space or just show me the folders where it is being 'stored'?

 

It won't change anything itself, it just makes it very simple to find out what is using it. Windows Explorer doesn't help with that, Lord knows why.

 

Gotcha.

I've spent some time on making this machine work properly, but space is of the essence. The computer was rarely used and had no important files. Is it better to just reload the OS at this point?

I should probably add that I'm thinking of making this into a dual-boot.I Thought initially that I would convert it entirely to xubuntu, since I'm using that for a desktop nowadays--except there is a program I need in class that runs Silverlight.

 

If you have the installation media and a valid key then I would recommend a clean install every time from that situation, but updating it to SP3 will be a bit of a pita

 

I might just do that then. Thanks.

 

Here's another "friend"

WinDirStat

 

Sorry. Forgot about this one.

SpaceSniffer

I have used both of these.

 

Thank you for the help.

I went ahead and reinstalled windows and upgrdaded it to XP pro in the process, I'm still mucking with drivers. but it had to be done, it is booting up in less than 4 minutes now, and that is a good thing. I've also got xubuntu working in dual-boot as well.

I think it was starting slow because it was having to plow through Gigs of old uninstall files to do anything, when I checked the drive out with treesize, there were countless numbers of $NtUninstallK...$ files in the sys32 config file at anywhere from .5 to several Megs in size. Those weren't showing up in my windows searches AFAIK.Those might have been the mysterious space hogs.

 

Win XP booting in less than 4 minutes is still very slow in my opinion. Check your startup items.

Once your system is fully updated, make a backup, then you can remove all these $NtUninstall folders.

For both tasks I recommend using CCleaner.
Startup items: Tools | Startup
$NtUninstall folders: check 'Hotfix uninstallers' in the cleaner section