Low Disk Space message

[Radius]

Is what I've been getting from my C: drive recently. I run 2 external drives as well. I freed up 25gb of space on C: by backing up some photos to the two drives and deleting them off the local drive, but now suddenly the memory's all gone again.

I thought it could be cache / temp stuff, but surely not 25gb's worth in about 2 weeks?!

Any ideas?


Jack

 

[SavageHoutkop]

erm... are you sure you properly deleted the stuff (i.e. not sitting in your recycle bin?).

Tried running 'Disk Cleaner' if it's Win XP? Not the greatest but good for spotting those temp files. Also if you've never cleaned your internet cache, might be a good thing to do. I've managed about 1gb of temp stuff on my work PC but that included temporary installation files etc.

And 25 gigs in 2 weeks would be a record, I think My poor C drive only has 5 gigs to begin with!

 

[CopperBrompton]

Have you emptied the recycle bin?

 

[Radius]

Yes, recycle bin is completely clear. I've run the file compressor etc a few times but it doesn't free up all that much space, and often it (the space) disappears again very soon anyway. It shouldn't do that.

 

[gaz]

Any you running any heavy duty applications like photoshop or a movie editor?

 

[Radius]

No, that's the thing, I'd understand this if I was. (incidentally I've set up most of my heavy duty apps to cache to my 500gb external drive anyway). I'm only running the browser and a few background apps. Makes no sense at all.

 

[gaz]

when was the last time you ran a virus checker? and what anti-virus software and firewall do you run?

 

[Radius]

I run a virus scan every day but it never gets anywhere near to finishing as I have so many files (I've run it for 5 hours plus and it's still not been nearly done). AVG is what I use, and I'm not a computer-illiterate numpty so don't go clicking around on the net on everything that says I'm the 1,000,000th lucky winner of this or that...

 

[peanut]

I am not sure I understand what you mean by low memory but if you have deleted that much data off your C drive you will need to run defrag twice to make your data contigeous and sort your drive out again.
Sounds to me like you haven't actually deleted the files off the drive
have you tried chkdsk ?

 

[mad al]

I had the same problem with my old pc and I was also running AVG and had a 500gb external drive, used windows XP. Increased the memory, tried everything under the sun and would still get the message

I found that everything was being duplicated by the pc even if it was saved to the external HD

 

[Radius]

I mean Windows kindly gives me a bubble that says "You are running very low on disk space... " etc.
I will defrag when I'm not actually using the comp., but I'm pretty sure I got rid of them properly. I haven't tried chkdsk recently, perhaps I will...thanks.

 

[Radius]

I had the same problem with my old pc and I was also running AVG and had a 500gb external drive, used windows XP. Increased the memory, tried everything under the sun and would still get the message

I found that everything was being duplicated by the pc even if it was saved to the external HD

Interesting. I've seen no evidence of this happening, but might have to delve a bit further, hadn't thought of that....

 

[gaz]

When you delete files, how do you do it?

 

[Radius]

I either had to use the 'delete permanently' button, or I deleted and emptied the rec. bin

 

[SavageHoutkop]

The 'duplicating everything' theory is probably it then. For instance, my folks' pc runs Nero something-or-other which my dad uses to 'album-ise' his photos. All it does is assign photos into albums, so basically it's a different file explorer, really, but he uses it because it pops up whenever he plugs in his camera.

Then, he starts getting these low disk space messages, and it turns out that Nero is copying all the photos from where they are stored (somewhere intelligent like, um, not the C: drive) and stashing them in some obscure c: drive location). Every photo!