Computer help

[_Zoot_]

Hey,

I know nothing about computers, but I think that there might be a problem with mine. I'm hoping that someone might be able to help me, or point me at some software that I can use to save me purging my computer.

The problem seems to be that something has taken up rather a lot of room on my computer, and I can't find out what, or account for it. I have about 900gb worth of storage on this thing, something like 230gb is taken up by games, and 130gb by films and tv shows and other media.

The rest... I'm not sure.

Can anyone suggest to me something that I can do to identify what is taking up the rest of the storage, or some software that I can point at the problem and let loose? Otherwise, I'll save what I can and burn the rest! :smalltongue:

Thanks!

[shawnhcorey]

Download and run a virus scanner. There are plenty of free ones. Make sure to specify your operating system and its version in your search.

[Ninja_Prawn]

I'm not a super computer expert, but my instinct says 900GB isn't a whole lot of storage space these days. I've got about 3.5TB between all my drives, and it's over half full.

That said, yeah check for viruses. Keep an eye on how hard your CPU's working. Maybe buy some extra storage. You could even try a disk defrag, though modern systems don't really need that.

[M0rdecai[QC]]

SpaceMonger.exe (https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByKi_P3Y_CKSMzIyNTgyZTMtMmM3OS00ZDVhLTgwMzUtNzM3Z GMyZWQ4ZmNj/edit)

[_Zoot_]

I thought that might be the case! I'm looking for something now, thanks guys!

[Xyril]

You should also keep in mind the difference between size of data and size on disk. I don't know how you're estimate the actual amount of data taken up by videos, etc, but it's possible that the way you're measuring is giving you the former and not the latter. Back in the day, before I became more diligent about archiving my digital comics, I'd often have a tone of small images taking up twice as much disk space as the actual useful data would require.

Also, Windows system files take up a surprising amount of space. Well, possibly surprising depending on how cynical you are about Microsoft.

[AMFV]

Probably temporary caches of files. In the new age, temporary internet video caches and stuff can easily reach over 100 gigs. Possibly even higher if you never clean them out.

[snowblizz]

Running Windows 10 you'll have at least a pageswpa as large as your RAM. Then Window will hide away some portion of the drive for recovery and other such purposes.

Windows 10 keeps an old copy whenever a new install version comes out, last oen was around April with a rollout ever since.

The various temporary files as mentioned and then there's a lot of hidden lgo and system temporaries. There's this Problme reporter thing that colelcts metrics on errors and ideally should uupload it to MS. I'e had that eat up severla gigabtes ona laptop.

Run the Windows diskcleaner and also run Storage sense (I think it's called that). Basically Win10 can tell you roughly where your space is going. On Windows 10, Settings nad Storage and it will look through all discs.

To my surprise emails and pictures tend to eat loads of space.

Today viruses do not take up space per se, there's no gain for them in that (and an excelelnt way to get caught). They do much more nefarious stuff, mostly geared towards the Internet.

[thracian]

;23213189']SpaceMonger.exe (https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByKi_P3Y_CKSMzIyNTgyZTMtMmM3OS00ZDVhLTgwMzUtNzM3Z GMyZWQ4ZmNj/edit)

For all the less-security conscious people out there, downloading and running a program from a random google drive link on a public forum is generally not a smart thing to do.

Jdiskreport and windirstat are the typical recommendations for finding out what folders are eating all that space. At that point, you can then google what those folders are to see if they are important.


I'm not a super computer expert, but my instinct says 900GB isn't a whole lot of storage space these days. I've got about 3.5TB between all my drives, and it's over half full.

That said, yeah check for viruses. Keep an eye on how hard your CPU's working. Maybe buy some extra storage. You could even try a disk defrag, though modern systems don't really need that.

Storage space depends a lot. You can fairly easily end up with a $2500 laptop with 250 gigs of storage, and for the same cost you could buy 80+ TB of desktop hard drives. Most people have anywhere from a 320GB to a 1TB drive (depending on desktop, laptop, how old it is, etc.) Anything over 1TB of internal storage is super uncommon in the grand scheme of people using computers.

Disk defrags are super useful things on modern operating systems, but usually they get scheduled automatically in the background. What they aren't useful for is Solid State Drives.


Probably temporary caches of files. In the new age, temporary internet video caches and stuff can easily reach over 100 gigs. Possibly even higher if you never clean them out.

I've never ever run any disk cleanup utility on this laptop, used it almost every day for 3 years, mostly for internet browsing. I've never manually deleted any cache or temporary files manually. My Windows drive is less than 100gigs total. Temp files can rarely get massive, but it's by no means the first thing I'd jump to.


Running Windows 10 you'll have at least a pageswpa as large as your RAM. Then Window will hide away some portion of the drive for recovery and other such purposes.

Windows 10 keeps an old copy whenever a new install version comes out, last oen was around April with a rollout ever since.

The various temporary files as mentioned and then there's a lot of hidden lgo and system temporaries. There's this Problme reporter thing that colelcts metrics on errors and ideally should uupload it to MS. I'e had that eat up severla gigabtes ona laptop.

Run the Windows diskcleaner and also run Storage sense (I think it's called that). Basically Win10 can tell you roughly where your space is going. On Windows 10, Settings nad Storage and it will look through all discs.

To my surprise emails and pictures tend to eat loads of space.

Today viruses do not take up space per se, there's no gain for them in that (and an excelelnt way to get caught). They do much more nefarious stuff, mostly geared towards the Internet.

Side note: If I didn't already know what you were saying, the typos can make this frustrating to understand and google for additional info.

While all the small things can add up, unless you're running a dual-socket server motherboard, the page file is unlikely to be in the 3 digits of GBs. Windows.old folder, similarly, tends to be around 20GB and will delete itself 10 days after the update anyway. While all of those things can be taking up unneeded space, the gap of several hundred gigs is going to be made up somewhere else. The missing hard drive space for the recovery portion is usually ~500MB, and won't show in the available storage anyway! The "1TB= ~930GB" conversion accounts for way more than that in terms of suspiciously missing storage.

I agree with the point about the viruses, though.


tl;dr I like jdiskreport. Java-based, but it gives a nice pie chart of what folders are using space. You can dig down through the folder structure to see what subfolder is using all the space in that folder. Repeat until culprits are found.

[Fooliscious]

If you play Blizzard games uninstall and reinstall them. They stockpile older patches and it eats up data quick. Uninstalling and reinstalling reinstalls just the current patch and will nuke the old data.