Maybe a stupid question but...

...

I have been tasked with clearing my mums laptop up a bit so she can actually defrag the thing!
There is one partitioned drive in the machine, about 50Gb or so each.
I started clearing space, deleting folders, removing applications that she doesn't use or know what they are.
When I started there was about 118Mb free, a few minutes later, 1.52Gb. I carried on going around the laptop trying to find anything that was no longer needed, photo's, document's, songs, etc you know the stuff.

Anyway, go back to check on how much space I had cleared..only to find that I know only had 1.41Gb free..something is literally eating space on her C drive!
I have checked through add or remove program's and there isn't nearly enough in there to add up to the 50Gb or so that is being taken up on the C drive.

She doesnt use the other drive..why i have no idea, but I have fixed that issue by dumping out dated stuff on there.

I was wondering if anyone had any experience with maybe a virus, or malware, or whatever that likes to eat bits, bytes, kilobyes, megabytes etc?

Try something like WinDirStat - free and will show you graphically where all the space is being used :)

could be system restore doing a restore point every time you remove a program.

or temp files from all the copying you've been doing. maybe even the pagefile.

Cheers, will look into it.

Just seemed weird how so much space vanished in a few minutes.

If you want to go faster, and get rid of the problem, you might just want to back up the laptop hard drive on an external hard drive or just back up the files on DVD's and then reformat the drive. I did it after having a hard drive cluttered for 5 years and the difference was tremendous.

Thanks but I already know all this. The problem is I work full time and no one in the house is capable of formatting a PC let alone a laptop.

My mum's primary use of the laptop is for her ebay business, so she need's almost constant access to it, so formatting would be a pain in the back side.

I will research into what the cause may be a little more and see what I can come up with.

run mbam to check there is no nasties on there, ive had a customer in the past, about 6 months ago that had a nasty eating up her drive space, only left 50mb or so !, cant remember the name of the nasty either, but if theres anything on there mbam should take care of it.

Run DiskClean Up from \System Tools\ did that on a friends PC and cleaned out atleast 15gbs worth of pure crap, and try CCCleaner aswell.

It could also be System Restore going a little crazy on the restore points. If so, delete all of them expect the last one.

Recycle Bin also reserves a certain amount on each hard drive too, so you might want to turn it off on the hard drive.

OK heres what ive done so far.

Deleted temp files
Did disk cleanup
Removed any apps she doesnt use or need.
Move anything I could over to the second parition.
Change the temp and tmp file locations to the second partition.
Defragged (Only 2% free, but it did it and took ages!)
Scanned with ad aware (Also installed on second partition)
Scanned with AVG


Will let the ad aware full scan complete then will see what this mbam can do and will look at cccleaner.

Very frustrating, I clear about 1.5Gb of space, then its used again.
I have checked through add remove programs and there is no way that it reaches nearly the 50Gbs apparently being used.

Disable system restore + delete all restore points?

Bit of an update.

Reduced amount of space used by System Restore points.
Deleted old restore points
Ran Mbam
Ran CCCleaner.

Free space is now 3.70Gb which is a massive improvement.

As for disabling the restore points, I dont really want to do that due to the reasons mentioned above (She uses it for her ebay shop, she isn't one for backing up and she generally relies on me to fix things. With me going on holiday for 3 weeks soon, I dont want to leave her without some for of redundancy or restore).

Its an old ish laptop anyway, she could do with a new one, just cant afford it right now.