I got a used Dell Optiplex 745 about a month a go. It has about 80 gig HD on it. When I got it, it had the requisite, what, 60-80% of the 80g. Now, all of a sudden, it only has about 1. i don’t have very many programs, and very few files, that I know of. Can you tell me how to find out where all of my disk space went?
Thanks,
hh
There are various utilities that will tell you what’s consuming your hard drive space. WinDirStat is one such utility.
Once you find out, a disk upgrade is in order. Cheap, and you can just add a new disk without replacing the old one. You’ll be glad you did – 80GB is awfully small by today’s standards.
Yes, I know…I only use this one for small, dedicated jobs.
Thanks for the input, guys!
hh
Well, installed WinDirStat, and it opened the window that only said “C Drive: using 98.7%” or something very similar.
Any other ideas???
It doesn’t make sense…I have few programs, little content…I’ve only had it a month…Driving me crazy!
thanks,
hh
Stop! You’re a genius and I’m an idiot!
Just found out how to use it.
Found 51 gig in text on desktop! Must be one heck of a novel! Correction: must have been!
Thank you, Dewey Finn!
Never mind.
That isn’t how WinDirStat works. You need to run it on the C: drive. To do this, select it in the splash screen then click “OK”. It will take a few minutes to analyze the disk, then it will give you a big graphic at the bottom of the screen with hundreds of blocks representing files. You hover over these files and it will tell you what each one is. Concentrate on the really big ones or big clusters of similar colors.
ETA: oh you worked it out. I’ll leave the explanation above though in case someone’s searching for it.
Thanks again, guys!
You can recover space with cccleaner. I’ve seen 5 year old pc’s with over 5 gig of temp files left over from those years of web surfing. That’s significant on a 80 G drive.
cccleaner is free and it only removes temp files, cookies etc. I have mine customized to keep my most important cookies like the straight dope, Amazon, yahoo so I don’t have to log back in. It runs every time I reboot.
What were those text files? Was there some sort of automated logging creating them? Because I recommend watching the system to see if they are recreated.
Any idea where that 51GB text file came from? My WAG is that some problem caused an insane amount of log info to be dumped to that file.
You may have some sort of a key logger utility. Do you remember the name of the file? See if it is back. I had the same problem with my 80 gig drive. I had to beg my son in law’s help. He found and killed the program storing everything.
Such a program could be useful as long you knew it was there and dumped stuff in a timely fashion.
51 gigs of text?
that’s an astronomical number of words…
I can’t imagine how many pages would it fill.
What kind of log file or keylogger or whatever would generate that many characters?
Well, I had downloaded Anvil Studio, 2011. Apparently, it was Anvil Studio text. I deleted it ASAP, of course, and I was afraid to open it, because I didn’t want to wait the 10 hours (or whatever) it would take for a 51g document to open. I went to google to see what it could have meant, but, the first site that I landed on said that it was a record of the installation. Of course, at that point I said, “Forget this!” And, that’s where I left it! I had thought, also, that even Word could not accomodate 51g.
I’m away from the computer at this moment, but, I do plan to monitor the situation. I am pretty sure that the file wasn’t a full 51g when I downloaded Anvil, so it must have been (I’m guessing) progressive, and I was suspicious that it was some sort of recording utility. I thought that I may have left Audacity recording something, but, I remembered that I had deleted it (Audacity). When I clicked the properties on the music that I had on Anvil, it was well under 1g…totally mystifying, but the WinDirStat tracked it down. Vengeance!
51 GB is way too large for any kind of log file. One character (letter, number, symbol, etc.) takes up one byte. 51 GB is 51 *billion *characters.
From Wikipedia
All Wikipedia pages in all languages comprise 8 billion words. So if the average length of a word is 6 letters, then your 51 GB text file could hold a printout of all of Wikipedia. Regardless of what the actual numbers are, there’s no valid reason for any log file to be anywhere remotely close to that size.
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
What is the file type/extension? TXT, LOG, or whatever? As long as it’s not a malware file, the characters after the period will tell you what kind of file it is, albeit in a broad context.
It sounds like you may be confusing a program (Audacity, logger, etc.) with the data created by such (maybe TXT, LOG). True text files are usually so tiny they can be swept under the carpet without anyone noticing. And deleting the application file(s) isn’t going to delete the files they create.
=190 words, 645 characters (ignoring spaces), 834 (including spaces)
I think, because I deleted it just about the second I spotted it, it was txt extension. I tried to delete it, and it said it was too large for the Recycle bin, so I couldn’t go there to check. I think.
Another bizarre bit was when I tried to use Restore System. I would go to the last date, and it would say install Anvil, 3 30 pm, whatever date. I would use the Restore, and it gave me a few megabytes, maybe a few hundred. Any rate, I would go to the SR again, and it would have the next one as Install Anvil, 1:30 pm the same date. I did this about 5 or 6 times, and after that, it had something like undo the SR function, or something. That’s when I came to you guys!