What's eating my memory?

I’ve been conscious not to download anything for awhile now. All I run, in regards to the Internet, is Zonealarm, Opera, and Netscape. No Kazaa Lite. None. Zip. It’s been turned off because I’m almost totally out of space.

Last night I had 170 megs left, now (noon) my c drive properties tell me I have 43 but a warning box just told me that “C DRIVE IS FULL”. My temporary Internet folders have 1.45 megs in them and I have downloaded nothing else. What’s going on? (I’ve had weird memory problems for awhile… ie. my c drive properties will say I have 700 megs left, but I run out of space after downloading 200 megs.)

Norten Anti-Virus, full version and upgraded to the max, has detected about thirty infected files on my computer but tells me they’ve been quarantined for months and are harmless. Should I worry?

Why don’t you start off by deleting those quarantined files? You do that by accessing the site, going to “quarantined files” and deleting them.

Win XP?

Do a search for files, set the advanced parameter ,or “when mnodified” option to “one day”, (the day that all the space was lost).
When the search finishes, use the sort bar over the Date column to sort by time. Look for the times when these events happened and see what files were (are) involved. This may you an idea of where to go.
Otherwise;
Empty your Recycle Bin AFTER dumping most of the files from;
Check C:\DocumentsSettings(your account name)\Cookies
Check C:\DocumentsSettings(your account name)\Local Settings
TemporaryInternetFiles
You can use the browser tools to do this, but it is harder to be selective about which ones you keep. Remember, passwords, etc are in cookies, so keep the important ones.

Lastly, If you have only 170 meg left, you must have a very small, or very full hard drive. Windows uses th4e hard drive for creating virtual memory, and that can easily use 100 to 150+ Meg. (I just looked, my file is at 205 Meg currently)

I would suggest a larger HD, they hare relatively inexpensive now, (slaved to the current one, it saves having to reload everything) or, a little drive cleaning and defragging.

The “quarantined” files, (I know where you’ve been) are probably not ever going to harm you. My experience with Norton is that it stores them as 0 byte files, (I tracked them down before). I can’t tell if this is the case with yours though. Keeping Norton (or any other AV) is a good practice.

Good luck.

I’ll second a larger HD. It’s pretty easy to get your docs from the old one to the new one. You can even install it in tandem with the new one, as a slave drive.

I’m using Windows 98 and another problem I just remembered is when I delete files only a small amount of them appear in my recycling bin (and these aren’t files that are too big for the recycling bin). They just disappear.

I’ve got a 12 gig hard drive, small by today’s standards, but I can usually keep it at around eight or nine gigs.

You can search your HD for large files & find out where they are.

Is your windows/temp folder full of stuff?

Just a thought, Have you run ScanDisk lately?

There may not be anything terribly unusual going on in your system. Anytime the free space starts hovering around your swap file size, you can run into all kinds of crazy stuff.

Also, you should defrag often now. Having only 5% of your space free means the file system will be working overtime to find a place to keep the files.

Just pretend you only have an 11 gig drive and you should be fine. Consider that last gig “reserved”.

Thanks for all the tips. I’ll give them a shot.

Ok, I have a memory question. I’ve been told that DDR RAM performs on both the top and the bottom of the clock cycle, but what’s the practical difference? 512 megs is still 512 megs, right? Is the difference in how fast the memory can interface with the processor? It’s not that DDR actually holds more in memory, right?

In practical terms, is there any sense in which 128 megs DDR is equivalent to 256 megs in SDRAM, or something?

Anal Scurvy: You might also check your System Restore. I’ve had it take up over a gig before. Start > Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Disk Cleanup. Once it comes up, pick the More Options tab, then pick the Clean Up button under System Restore.

Cardinal: The practical difference is that memory reads and writes are faster. That’s it. 512 MB is still 512 MB.