megs mysteriously used up.....

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Why does 100meg disappear overnight? I have to use auslogics defrag because of limited space. This is a secondhand HP Vectra VL800 history unknown, nine gig hard drive. I know little abt pc's I sweep often etc. Something is lurking hidden. Advice please.

Its 2000XP, unfortunately sold to me counterfeit therefore limited updates.

Some files have been known to hide in the recycle bin of Windows. This was a b***h to discover how to get rid of. Anti-virus software never saw it. So I went in manually. Could be part of an update. Could be the paging file being expanded

try also using CCleaner http://www.ccleaner.com/

and yeah, it could very possibly be the paging file using the hddrive

i love that avatar.

yep, used ccleaner often. I also use auslogic defrag as it will function in 50megs - as you will pknow anyway. A download freebie tells me windows has 16 gigs! down to abt 3 megs now.....

Defragmentation does not clear up space. Have you rounded up the usual suspects (temporary files, etc)?

Watch out for Adobe stuff too. It tends to automatically download updates. HUGE updates. In fact Adobe occupies and obscene amount of disk space nowadays - if you let it.

I jettisoned adobe and got a freeware 600k pdf reader. Also, I didn't know defragging did not free up space. How do I get to delete t.i.files other than tools, etc? thanks.

I am no longer a Windows user since 2000, but I think that there are certain programs to clean up the disk by removing these unused files.

I've run lots of programmes to clean up and still no space frees up. Advice required.

When windows applies a patch it creates a system/hidden folder in the winnt folder that starts with $ntuninstallkb blah blah these can usually be safely deleted (I have never run into an instance where I needed to uninstall a patch through add/remove programs and I've been admin for over 200 windows PCs for 10 years). The ones created after installing a service pack are particularly huge(\$NtServicePackUninstall$).

You can also do a search in your winnt folder and subfolders for .log and .hlp files and delete those. They're each pretty small but there are a lot of them and it adds up.

As others have already stated though you can probably get better results uninstalling old programs and deleting media files you dont need as well as changing the swap file settings to manual and setting it to something low (you lose performance but gain disk space).

Interesting, thankyou. I shall have to learn what the jargon means (no disrespect intended) and get cracking....

just search for the folder Fraya mentioned, but I think you'll need to open a explorer windows > Tools (or options)
and find "show hidden files and folders".

tks