Hard Drive Hog

Hi there,

I don't know a whole lot about computers, so please go easy on me.

I have a Gateway Intel Pentium 4, 2.39 GHz running Windows XP Home Edition Version 2002, Service Pack 2. It has 1GB memory and 38.2GB hard drive with 1.18GB remaining. I cannot figure out where my memory went. I bought an external hard drive to put most of my pictures and word documents on and it didn't even make a dent and now there is only 2GB of space used on the external drive. I have very few programs downloaded, so I am stumped.

Today I downloaded Tree Size and it showed out of 37,832 MB used, 28,727MB was being taken up by WINNT. Is that normal?

Any help at all would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

Diane

 

Hi. I'm not familiar with WINNT. Is that a windows program or something you downloaded. You can find out which folders are taking up the most space by opening explorer and scrolling over each folder in the C drive. find the one that is the biggest and open it. Then find the biggest file or folder in there. Repeat until you find the culprit.

 

WINNT is the directory where windows itself is installed. It's unusual that it's taking up that much space, you may want to look add/remove programs and order by size, to see if there are any specific programs that are huge.

If not, then it may be just a case of finding the specific directory that's using all the space and find out why it's doing so.

 

Yup.

You do want to be careful with the WINNT directory, as Addis pointed out, it contains the Windows installation. While by default the important stuff is hidden to prevent foul-ups, be careful about deleting things, especially if you're not sure what they are.

I'd also check your pagefile. By default Windows manages this, but I'd check to make sure it's not running at some massive chunk. Microsoft goes with a 1.5 x (system RAM amount), but can fluctuate if not set at a fixed size (doing so will require a restart).

 

Hi,

Sorry, I don't understand. What is a page file and how do I check it?

Thanks.

Diane

 

Right-click on 'My Computer' and select Properties.

Click on the 'Advanced' tab and then click the Settings button in the Performance section.

By default, you'll have a Windows-managed pagefile on your C drive.
It should be no more than 2 times the size of your system RAM.

 

Thanks Big B, but my computer doesn't seem to access the page file in the same way. When I click on properties in My Computer the only tabs on top are General and Shortcut. When I click on the advanced button on each of these there is nothing about a page file. What am I doing wrong?

Thanks again for your help.

Diane

 

You have My Computer set as a shortcut on your desktop. Thats why you have those tabs. Click Start, and right click on the My Computer Icon in that menu.
That should be the "real" my computer.

 

Thanks fellow geek trainee. My Computer was not on my start menu. However, I was able to find the information I needed under Control Panel by right clicking on the System icon.

Thanks again.

Diane

 

Sure thing. Glad I could help.