Vanishing Drive Space

Hmmmmm . . . somehow my unused drive space has almost vanished. Somewhere in the last two weeks I've gone from 2.97GB unused to 500MB (as indicated in the drive space info at the bottom of Explorer. I admit in the last couple of months I've added Avast AV, Fast Defrag, Spam Butcher and Zone Alarm Home Edition. But still, from 2.9 Gig to 500 Megs is quite a jumpdown. Any way to tell what culprit is eating so much?

System: PII 333, WD 5.7 gig HD, Win 98 Ist Edition, Oh yeah, just replaced the old monitor with a new Viewsonic 17 ultrabright and added a M$ optical, cordless mouse recently.

Also have installed and uninstalled several apps from MG. I was defragging tonight on safe mode and notice a HUGE chunk of space is occupied. (The defrag hung at 35% for five or so minutes and reverted to 0% defragmented and started over again. It's almost like my network drives are still connected.)

Ideas?

 

Go into "C" drive, click on the "Windows" folder, find and click on a folder named "Temp", delete everything in the folder.

As for the defrag problem, "Ctrl + Alt + Delete" close down every process you can without shuting down the OS.

 

AVG leaves massive temp files on your HDD, and doesn't delete them. Search for files 200MB or larger in your Program Files directory or Documents and Settings directory, and you should find them.

 

are you using norton utilities?

if so, make sure Norton Protection is off.. it will store all your deleted files in a folder, even after you empty recycle bin.

 

Thanks for the tips. Tried 'em all, no success Now the only thing left is check out the hard drive. My comp. mechanic neighbor thinks the HD is going out. But, the good news is that now I get to shop for another computer You know, the Alienware stuff looks great, I think I'll maybe get . . . whoa . . . HOW MUCH???????????? My eyes just bugged out like my icon's do -- only bigger The quest begins. More to come . . .

 

test your drive with the manufacturers utility, that will tell you whether the drive is mechanically good or not. Next step after that is probably a format and reinstall.

 

Try using the directory graphical tool such as DirGraph to visualise large culprit files or directories, see http://www.spillett.net/dirgraph You can use this tool to zoom in or home into disk hogs.

You could also try one of the drive cleaners here: http://www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?id=12

I take you have already done a ScanDisk.