What causes computer hard drive free space to be eaten from 30 GB to 2 GB??

My sister needs HELP!!!

She is the most cautious computer owner I know as far as accepting e-mails etc. She has always worried about her computer having problems if she does too many activities on it.

She called tonight; her 'free space' on her computer is being eaten up QUICKLY---she has gone from a free space of 30 GB to 2 GB.
(She has made a few calls, resulting in a few functions like a system restore, etc.)

Can anyone help??

Pat

I'm no computer whiz, but my guess would be a virus. Is she well protected? She should run any virus scans she has available immediately.

With the bigger computers I've worked with through the years, this could be a symptom of a logfile building up to huge levels.

Sheila

Has she defragmented the drive?
If not have her try defragging

Windows has a built in defrag program.

In windows XP.....

start - programs - accessories - system tools - disk defragmenter

That can be run often - probably once a week is good for most people.

In addition some programs themselves can be compacted.
Like Access. Every time I use it - it gets bigger - then eventually I need to runs it's compactor.

a defrag isnt going to make any more space available. (not that its going to hurt anything to run regularly)

I would suggest doing a search on the computer for large files (you can specify this in your search criteria)..look for files over 2mb or so.

but yea, certainly sounds like a virus.

here is a free online virus scanner she can try

http://housecall.trendmicro.com/

Download and run the free version of AntiMalware from this website: www.malwarebytes.org. It's a great program for tracking and eliminating stuff like she is seeing. (No reason to buy the big program - the free version works fine.)

Dave

Just one more thought, could she have saved a lot of photos?

It's not necessarily a virus, it could be many things, including an unmanaged swap file that's grown out of control, cache files, unemptied recycle bin, downloaded applets, temp files, huge email files and attachments that are not using an imap server, ... anything.

How big is the drive? If it's a 60G drive, that's a lot. On the other hand, if it's a 250G or larger hard drive, then her hard drive was already pretty full with only 30G free.

Go to properties of the drive (right click the drive after opening my computer), and on the general pane, there's a disk cleanup button. Let it clean up the default things it's checked, plus temporary files, recycle bin, and whatever else you think is safe for it to clean up. See what the difference is after she runs that.

Unfortunately, with the little bit of information we have to go by, all we can do is guess. So that's what everybody is doing. It's going to be nearly impossible to help you, let alone somebody who isn't posting first hand, diagnose what the specific problem is without access to that computer.

-David

(First off, my sister and I are for the most part GUESSING at all of this!!)

After talking to her today, she learned how to look at contents on her hard drive ---and specifically at files as large as 2MB. She found MANY Norton scan files of at least that size.

She thinks that may be what it is. (DOES THAT SOUND RIGHT??)

She sent an e-mail; the way it works she is suppposed to get a reply within 24 hours.

A couple of months ago, they sent a notice that she should upgrade/update (may have been free). She's thinking she should have, because these 'scan files' all seem to have happened in the last two months or so.

As computer dummies, what do you think of this 'jibberish' (to me at least) that I have just reported??

Pat

I'm not sure what you or they are talking about, but if she has something like Norton A/V, and it's finding infected files, I think it puts them in a thing it calls a vault. Maybe that's what she's seeing? I don't know. It depends on how many there are and how much total disk space they are eating.

At this point, I'm going to recommend professional help if your sister can't find somebody local to help her for free.

I don't see how the upgrade will make a difference, BTW. It's beyond that now.

Seriously, there's not much we can do here. We're all guessing, and the scapel is in the hand of an untrained person.

-David

Maybe Norton can be configured to create log files of everything it does (every file scan, every disk scan..). Don't know if it does this or not, as I haven't had any invasive *&#$% from Norton on my system for many years. If these can grow without limit, that might well eat up a lot of disk space.