Maxed Hard Drive

My friend has a 2 year old Dell, running XP Home. He was complaing about it being so slow. I checked his Ram, 128MB. Recomended add another 256MB. Sayed, he had never Defraged his hard drive. I checked it. It was a 30GB. It only had 140MB free. He said, he got notices that his drive was full. It showed Red all the way across. Tried to defrag it. Got to 7% stopped. Sayed Windows could'nt continue, needed 15% of drive free to defrag?? Can,t find anything that could be taking up that much of his drive. Checked Add/Remove Programs. Everything there added to 5.6GB. No picture files, no large data stores, deleted all temp files. Still won't defrag???
Thanks for any help, I need it.

 

Try Start>Programs>Accessories>System Tools>Disk cleanup.

Do a search for temp files and .tmp. There are other places where tems are kept.

In Windows Directory there are $xxxxx uninstall files for Windows updates that can be deleted. Also in windows prefetch folder. Downloaded files, TIFs, cookies, history files....

 

Hi Coyote.

I doubt if a fragmented drive will slow down a computer noticeably, even one with lots of fragmented files.

Trying to buck the system minimums to defrag that drive may render the software unusable. Uninstalling, deleting, etc. That drive is just simply full and needs replaced. I would recommend a bigger drive and use that one for backup storage.

If you must defrag it, the best way is to install a disk image program, image the whole drive, fdisk and format the drive and restore the image. It will be fully defraged. I defrag about once a year and do just that. Saves from working the hard drive to death.

As for the slowness, note what programs are running in the background after you do a clean boot. You'll probably find a lot of stuff that doesn't have to be running. Also, turn off "Indexing service" in Services.

giles

 

If you want to make more space, uninstall any programs he may have a disk to, like a large game. you can always tell it to save your savegame files and w/ todays games it'll clear up 1-3 gigs quickly per game. Also, ace utilities can work well del "junk files" as well as cleaning up your registry. As giles said, defraging probobly isn't the major part of the problem. Go through the steps on this site, http://mywebpages.comcast.net/SupportCD/OptimizeXP.html skipping defrag till the end, black vipers link from there is also a good way to improve windows speed, as windows auto runs many background services not needed for most users, be sure to carefully read what each does before you take it off, if your not sure, leave it on. could cause problems otherwise.

good luck,

Charles

 

A couple of things to free up some space so the defrag works.

Some programmes install their install setup and/or exe files in the C:\Windows\Downloaded Installations folder. Delete ALL these packages from this folder. They wont affect the installed programmes or their operation.

Do a search using the following string in search, from the start menu.
*.old;*.bak;*.tmp;*.gid;*.dmp In particular the .dmp files caused by blue screen crashes (BSOD) can take up a lot of space depending on dump size settings. Delete all that is found.

Delete all from the Windows/temp and the C:\Documents and Settings\user login\Local Settings\Temp folders.

Delete all temporary internet and history files. The default size of the IE internet temp files folder is 10% of your disk size, so probably up to 3GB in your example. I usually set the size of this cache to 20MB only, which in more than enough!

Don't forget to empty the Recycle bin after as well.

In the future make sure the user runs the defragmenter at least monthy. It won't wear anything out so can be done as often as you like. Some defrag daily, but this is little more than overkill for the average user.

 

Hello Coyote,

As a side note:

XP will auto defrag on a schedule provided that the Task Schedular Service is enabled. Since your friend sounds cluless and TS is enabled by defualt, don't think that's the trouble.

Regards - Charles

 

Thanks for all the help. I deleted everything I could safely delete. The drive now shows, 650MB free. Up from 140MB. A far cry from the 4.5GB it calls for. I know you say the drive is full. He only has 16 pictures, 23 data files, 32 Midis, no games, he is not a gamer. Uses the computer for E-mailing and buying and selling on E-bay. I rechecked Add/Remove Programs. Everything there added to 5.6GB. I just cannot figure out why that drive shows to be that full. Could this just be a faulty drive?

 

Hi coyote.

There doesn't seem to be anything wrong with that drive as yet. Everything seems to be as it should be. The totals in the Add/Remove programs is no where near what that drive contains and cannot be used as a yardstick.

You can go to a DOS window (Command Prompt) and type:

cd \(enter)
dir /s(enter)

It will display all the data on the drive and at the end the total and what's left. It will take awhile depending on the speed of the computer but leave it alone and it'll get there. Write the totals down. Then you can type:

dir /as /s(enter)
(write the totals at the end down)
dir /ah /s(enter)
(write the totals at the end down)

This will display the hidden and system files including the hiberfil and pagefiles, which can be quite large. Total up everything and that should be a close total of what is actually on the drive. Files that are tagged as system and hidden will be shown both times so this may actually add almost a gig to the total. This is just for a ball-park figure.

You need a nice nerd to do a clean boot and do a Ctrl/Alt/Del and go to the Processes tab to see what is running. From that you can probably find out what is slowing things down. I wouldn't be concerned about defraging. Fragmented files do not usually slow down a computer noticeably and do not cause any problems. A single fragmented file usually can only slow down a computer by 12 thousands of a second and then only when the file is actually read from the hard disk (that's just an average folks, be kind).

giles

 

Hi coyote,

All the advice so far has been excellent. I haven't defragged a disk for years; I follow giles advice here.

Another possibility that hasn't been mentioned is infestation with spyware, adware and other trojans. Suggest you run adaware, spybot, and an online virus scan (all can be found by clicking 'Links' in my signature).

 

To gain some more free space you could reduce the amount of space that system restore uses (if you haven't already). I believe the default is 12%. On a 30 gig drive that's around 3.5 gigs of space it uses. Change it to whatever is acceptable to you and the oldest points will be deleted, the newer ones should stay.

 

Other things that take up a lot of room:

Norton protected files
MFT if you use NTSF
Windows indexing

 

One potentially large group of files are .log files, especially Dr Watson .log

One time I found a system that after 3 years on XP had 299 MB's of entries. Worth checking, it's in Documents & Settings > all users > application data > microsoft > Dr Watson.

Regards - Charles