to all the techies outthere

why does your available hard drive fluctuate so umpredictably with no apparent reason whatsoever. i mean, one timen you turn your computer and you 300mb. The next you might have 250 without having used anymore space on the disk. do I dare ask, why?

assuming you’re using windows, it is most likely the swap file (usually win386.swp or pagefile.sys, depending on the OS). Windows uses it for virtual memory, basically a RAM cache on the hard drive. It would definitely explain the fluctuations.

Some of it could also be due to program specific temp files. It is the exact same thing as quasar said, but specific to one program, so they don’t have the same name they mentioned. They aren’t quite as common these days on published software, but if you use in-house stuff, or older stuff many of theose programs will have 3 or 4 temp files. On a crash, they can sit there for weeks or months, till they get cleaned up, and suddenly you have more space.

sorry, meant “same thing muppetsoup said”.

Just to add… if your worry about the fluctuations is due to low drive space, you can set your swap file to max out at number of MBs you choose.

Just go System in Control Panel. Click Performance Tab. Click Virtual Memory to change settings. Of course if you set the swap file to max at a low amount, your computer will be a lot slower.

I read a support page said to set the virtual memory to match how much ram memory you have on the system. Haven’t tried it yet.

I have my virtual memory (swap file) fixed at 3 times my RAM (3x64Mb) because i have read that fixing the file size speeds up windoze somewhat. Interestingly if I check the disk properties I get about 610 Mb free space but if I check where you configure the swap file it reports about 800 Mb which shows it is counting the swap file space as free… interesting.

Possibly also cache?