I’ve had an Eee PC for a few months. It has what appears to be a partitioned hard drive (or two hard drives, a C: and a D:). For the past month or so, no matter what I do, the C: drive is always critically full. Earlier today I deleted about a gig’s worth of programs that it came with that I never use, and it was full again within an hour.
I have uninstalled and reinstalled the main program I use (Firefox) to the D: drive, and selected that drive as the default location for downloading new stuff from Firefox, but that did not seem to help. I cannot for the life of me figure out why I can’t keep C: from filling up. There has to be something writing to it in the background, but I can’t figure out what and where. I’ve cleaned my cache and cookies and that doesn’t help. Last night we cleaned out about 400 megs of Windows Update files in my temp folder and it filled up before the night was over. Right now I’m googling the issue but haven’t found anything that applies to me. Any ideas?
Be sure to set your Recycle Bin’s maximum size to something small enough that it can’t take over your free space (see how here). You may also want to consider setting a maximum size on your swap file (See under “How to manually change the size of the virtual memory paging file” here. This may affect performance, but not as badly as running out of free space.
I’d also consider strongly installing CCleaner, which I find to be excellent at de-gunkifying.
Did you try Asus’s message board (EEE PC is Asus, right?)? I had a lot of problems with one of their motherboards and got a lot of good info off the message board. I found their tech support very lacking, but the message board was a godsend.
Forgot to mention the utility of that kind of … utility.
I have a Linux machine I use as a backup server and it’s 300GB hard drive was getting full with less than 200GB data showing on it. I ran Baobab on it and discovered that every time I deleted a file while remotely accessing the server from a Windows machine, that file went not into the Trash folder like normal, but into a hidden auxiliary trash folder.
Was it actually empty(-ier) when you deleted the stuff? Like, did you see the free space increase, but then it was gone later? If so, this could be a runaway log file of some sort that’s constantly being appended to. It doesn’t take that much data output to fill up a Gig of space in an hour.
Also, you could check out WinDirStat. I like it because in addition to showing you the file tree, it also has a chart at the bottom that acts as a graphical representation of your hard drive - with larger files being represented as larger chunks, which are all divided into color-coded folders. It’s a very useful tool.
Voting against swap file and hibernation. On my PC (Windows XP), I have two hidden, system files in my root directory (c:) called hiberfil.sys and pagefile.sys which are 1 GB and 1.6 GB, respectively. I’m not running very many applications at the moment, and obviously am not hibernated, so it’s pretty clear Windows is reserving this space for future use, which would suggest that neither file will grow (particularly true for hibernation, which is roughly the size of my available physical RAM.) If they don’t grow, they’re not the source of Drain Bean’s disappearing free space.
DMC is right. You should set the swap file minimum AND maximum values to the same number, about 1.5x the RAM on your PC. That will stop the file from growing and shrinking all the time, which causes fragmentation of the disk as well.
I would also recommend a free program called CCleaner, which is freeware and very good at rooting out harddisk cruft of various kinds.