Hello Everyone,
My wife brought home a netbook computer of her workmate. It apparently is running butt slow and her friend asked me to look at it and see if there was anything I can do. Started with the obvious and firstly turned of indexing to free up some resources. Then I went to look at the hardrive for space and of course defrag. That is when I got a surprise, the hard drive is a 7.1 gig and it is showing 6.48 gig used! Needless to say there isn’t enough free space on the disc for the swap file. I did the basic clean up of deleting temp files, recycle bin, etc with little effect. For the life of me I cannot find a reason for all of the used disc space. There really isn’t anything on the C drive that would account for it. No pictures, videos etc… In fact I can’t find a single user created folder on the hard drive. What in the world could possibly be taking up 7 gigs? Any ideas??? Thanks!
Well, XP itself accounts for about 1.75 GBs on the computer–assuming the OS is running properly. What kind of netbook is it, though? Some of them are run on Linux shells that may still exist and your wife’s friend could have somehow left that on there (however unlikely that may be).
The problem with a lot of the older netbooks is that they are too small to effectively run XP, but the manufacturers loaded it anyway. Considering that she may have Office on there as well that’s about another GB. So we’re already at almost 3GBs. Any other programs on there, such as anti-virus or firewalls (especially suites like Norton 360) could do the trick.
My advice? Go into the Control Panel and the Add/Remove Programs and take a tally of what’s in there. Bear in mind, if you don’t know what it is, don’t uninstall it without Googling what it could be first. My guess is that you’ll find a lot of programs that can be trimmed from the computer and she still be running with some space, but honestly those netbooks aren’t useful for storage so much as internet access (hence then name).
Go get Treesize Pro and let it analyse the disk. But my top suggestions would be Outlook (.pst and .ost files) and Temporary Internet Files.
Thanks, it’s a Dell netbook, but I can’t seem to find the model number at the moment. It is running slow as can be so I will do what I can for her. Perhaps you are right that the 6+ gigs are just OEM programs, but that seems so stupid. Why would they almost fill the entire hard drive out of the box?
Of course it wouldn’t be my night without multiple problems. Trying to get on the Net with the stupid thing is yielding it’s own mysteries. I keep getting a Windsock error (page cannot connect, windsock error). Windows offers to fix it when I use the troubleshooting help and it does, then I have to re-boot. All is fine until I look at a few web pages, then right back to the same error.
Why in the world does everyone think I am some sort of IT person? I don’t mind fixing problems and usually can, but it isn’t something that comes naturally to me. I have to spend tons of time researching the problems, find the answers and then fix it. They of course think I can open it up, start it up and have everything working in 2 minutes. Argggggggggg
Of course this thing is so screwed I would prefer to take my copy of XP and just re-install the OS, but of course there is no CD drive so I don’t even know how to go about re-installing Windows. Jebus, spend the extra $100 and get a cheap laptop for Christ sakes.
http://windowsxp.mvps.org/winsock.htm May fix your winsock errors. I can’t vouch for the effectiveness nor veracity of that particular site, but Winsock Fix programs have been around since winsock stuff was in use, and is usually very successful.
As for why they did it… It was because they didn’t have a cheaper OS to load on those computers that was small enough to fit and that they felt customers would enjoy using. Unfortunately, they also decided to load it with crap OEM and ad software like the rest of their computers which was stupid. Asus did a Linux shell that was also crap, so there seemed to be no good answer.
Just knowing the brand was good enough. Dell is pretty bad about loading their computers with useless crap. If you do decide to go the route of a reinstall then this may help: http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/50282-34-tutorial-installing-home-professional-flash-drive
It takes some work, probably about an hour of time on your computer, but it should get the job done.
Thanks for the links. I will talk to her tomorrow and suggest a fresh install. This will load a clean XP without all the useless Dell crap. After poking around a bit more it looks like they only use it for Internet access. But get this, no anti-virus software to be found. Two years of surfing and zero protection. Probably 30 viruses on this damn thing. Can’t connect to the net long enough to install an AV program. Will load one from a USB flash or SD card in the morning just to see how many she has before the re-install. Probably enough adware and such on it to choke a super computer. How can woolen be that stupid.
For going on two years now I have been telling each of her teacher coriander to backup, backup and backup their work laptops. Get an external hard drive, use a USB flash, a CD, anything. Did they listen? Nope. Last week the music teacher sees me having lunch with my wife and looks very upset. Can I fix her computer? All of this semesters work was on it. Complete hard drive failure. Took everything I had not to simply shake my bald head and say “I told you”.
Such is the unfortunate status of my life, man. It’s what I do for a living. Not a week goes by without someone coming into the store having lost everything, and some stories are far sadder than the others.
It’ll install fine of a USB DVD drive, those run about $60-70. Borrow one if you can’t find one.
I’d highly, highly recommend installing a fresh copy of Windows. There are viruses can fill up your disk by downloading crap into hidden folders; I’ve been infected by one before. Reinstalling would be a quick and easy way to wipe those out.
Another thing to note: if it only has 7 GB of space, it almost certainly is running on a SSD. SSDs “shrink” over time as sectors go bad and are marked “unusable” by the disk firmware. I don’t know if that’s a factor here at all-- my hunch is no, but it might be worth looking into.