Very strange HDD drive problem

[c.ruel]

My gf's C: drive has 0 bytes of free space. When trying to locate the folder that was taking up all the room we couldn't find it. Actually we turned "hidden folders" on. Then we went to C:Users\name\appdata we discovered that appdata is HUGE, 25 gig huge to be precise. Within it there is a folder called local\Windows\Microsoft and that is 23 gig big.

So this folder is simply too big. Can I trim it some how? Delete it? Or shift it to a different drive? Any help would be much appreciated because my gf's computer has ground to a halt due to no swap space.

[GoNz0]

virus scan time ?

i have 133mb in there so time to delete stuff

what folder is taking the space in there ?

[Fraz]

Mine is about 2.5 gigs in size, so 25 gigs does seem rather a lot...

[c.ruel]

There is a file in there called temporary internet files that is 23 gig ... I can delete that right!? That is just search history and cookies?

[GoNz0]

hell yeh, wipe the lot. might be worth running the disck cleanup wizard after, running it before will take ages with that much.

[Dareos]

check for Temp too, some things save there for some reason, cleaned out a mates pc recently and it had 120GB in there, craziness.

[deejayburnout]

Sounds to me like you need to back up all her important files and wipe the drive and re-install windows.

That would make a bigger and better improvement.

[c.ruel]

well we downloaded a program called Ccleaner becuase we couldn't delete the files but with that program we managed to and now there is 23 gig of free space where there was 0 before so it must have deleted the folder and the computer seems perfectly stable and smooth again

[dokdek]

Run CCleaner every once in a while, it frees up a lot of space taken up by junk, I personally run it once every month.

[Megabiv]

Yeah quite a common occurrence for people to not realize that Windows stores a lot of temporary crap on the hard disk.

[arthurleung]

Right click into properties of C: and there is a built in disk cleanup tool.

Using CCleaner you might accidentially delete your browsing history / saved passwords.