i have a slight problem with one of my drives it seems that it is almost full 87.8gb full 5.3gb free but i can find only a little over 17gb worth of stuff on that drvie and have tried several disccleanup utilites and i do not wish to reformat this drive as it has the os on it and i dont feel like going through all that stuff

 

Have you ever thought of buying a new hard drive and move the stuff over to the new drive?

 

i have space on other drives but its like about 70gb woth of something that is not in any of the folders so hoow can i move it/delete if i cant find it?

 

might be hidden folders? i suggest you backup the important stuff on that drive, and reformat it

 

you could possibly have a virus. I had a virus on my very first computer that just filled up space with shit that ditn' mean anything. It was a 20 gig hard drive and like 14 gigs were full of shit from that virus.

 

i have mcafee antivirus stuff but ill try running it again also on my profile the temp internet files take up 10gb even after i delete everythin i have it set to show all files so i dont think there are any hidden files i know i can just reformat it but its a pain and takes forever to intstall all my software

 

On my computer I had to use the DOS Prompt to go into my temp internet folder to remove files that didn't show up using Windows Explorer. It saved me over 6GB+ of space.

There may be other files that are hidden as well.

Start Isolating folders to figure out which ones contain the highest filespace usage.

 

Tools>folder options>view>check "show hidden files and folders"

 

what did you put in the command prompt to do this?

 

Step 1) Buy new drive
Step 2) Use Norton Ghost to image old drive on new drive
Step 3) Enjoy new drive

 

do this and you will see all of the hidden files, it works. I saved about 3 gbs of unnessary garbage that the company put on my computers

 

well to search the directories just the simple "dir" command with whatever switches you want for display options

so I did that first going through my internet folders and seeing what kind of files were in there. Basically the only files that needed to be in there was the index.dat file that IE uses, and my cookies. Any other file that are from websites could be deleted.

So at the top of the Temp Internet folder I performed a "del" command and basically deleted all of the files with a given extension one at a time

For example

del /s *.gif and that would automatically delete all the gifs from all of the temp internet folders.

del /s *.jpg
del /s *.htm
del /s *.swf
del /s *.jpeg
del /s *.png

those are just some of the file types you may see in there, there's also mov, asx, wmv, jpe, css, js, ico. You'll see a lot if there is anything in there.

BE VERY CAREFUL AND MAKE SURE YOU ARE IN THE TEMPORARY INTERNET FOLDER BEFORE YOU DO THIS!!!!!!


And I always have "Show Hidden Files and Folders" selected on my computer. But for some reason, not all of the temporary internet files show up, and deleting them from IE using the "Delete files" command didn't do it either.

 

how do i get "in" the temp internet files from the comand prompt as most of the files in there arent shown with show hidden option selected

 

Check under local settings of all the profiles under Documents and Settings...

 

when viewing the folders using dir use the /a switch so you can see all the folders of where you are.

even if they are hidden you can navigate to them.

Another trick you can use is where you type out part of the folder name and then hit the TAB key, the prompt will fill in the rest of the name of the folder/document for you.