HD Space

Chances are the answer is no.

You need to search your hard drive for large folders and analyze the contents )open Windows Explorer; right click on a folder or subfolder to determine the size of the folder and its contents).

You don't by chanceuse Kazaa, do you?

How Much time do you spend on the internet and how full are your temporary internet folders? Clear out your history files and clear out the windows\temp directory and see if that takes care of a lot of your space issues. If not, is your drive in 2partitions or one and 20gig free combined or on the drive with the system files?

In WinXP you can do a Disk Cleanup by going to Start --> Programs --> Accessories --> System Tools --> Disk Cleanup... see what it reports.

Also use Start --> Search and look for any ~*.* files and *.tmp files -- select them all and delete themas well.

Delete everything in Temporary Internet Files (if you are using Internet Explorer) or Cache (if you are using Netscape). Browsing the Internet will eat up huge amounts of space as well.

Do you have antivirus programs running? Run a complete virus scan with up-to-date virus definitions. Make sure you don't have a hungry virus on your hdd.

System Restore can be causing a loss of performance and hard disk drive space. Go into Folder Options and unhide protected files and directories. In order to show all files go to My Computer, Tools, Folder Options, View, configure the 3 options there to show or unhide all files; then click Yes then OK to confirm. A folder named _Restore should show up on the C drive and may have many GB's in size. This is the restore or backup of your system which is only your system and not your data files anyway. If you make back ups of your data (which you should do on a regular basis anyway) then you won't need the system making all these snapshots of your file system and thus could turn off the system restore feature. I don't know exactly where it ison XP right now since I'm not at an XP workstation right now, but search windows help for "disable system restore." In addition to doing the Disk Cleanup and Defragment, this should free up much space on the HDD and improve your performance! Hope this helps!

Updates and hot-fixes often leave files behind that do take up disk space.

You need to clean out the Temp files folders for each user.

Also, clean out the Recent files folder for each user. This folder has a link for EACH file that you have ever opened on the PC.
On a 60GB drive formatted as FAT32, each link will take up 32K of drive space, even though the files are only a few bites each.
(not sure of the exact number for NTSF, but the space per file is less)

Chas

Along with the above options it would be prudent as well to run scandisk to see if any files are reporting a false amount of disk space used. Some viruses can cause this as well. Update your virus definition files first. You can also go to mcaffee.com and get a free scan online though it may take awhile to scan that way.

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