Imaginary space filled on my Laptop ??

Question

My XP laptop shows I have used up 100gb ( 8gb left ) when I know I clearly have not used that much. With music/games/files, I know I've used up at least 40gb. can't restore, can't defrag. what can be a solution? thanks for any help.

Answer 1

download this program called SequoiaView

http://w3.win.tue.nl/nl/onderzoek/onderz...

Its willcreate a graphical map of your hard drive showing where all that free space went.  Its awesome at locating huge junk files and stuff you dont need.  Oh yeah its free

Also Right click My Computer, Go to Manage, then to Disk Management.  Make sure you dont have your hard drive chopped up into useless partititions

Answer 2

Disk Clean Up (Start, Accessories, System Tools)

Then go to the other tab, delete all the old System Restore files, on the System Restore Clean Up button.

Then do a search for 'all files and folders' - of programs you have "Uninstalled" search for both "Company Name" such as: 'Adobe' and then "Program Name" or "version identifyier" such as: '7.0', with the options "Search system folders", "Search hidden files and folders" and "Search subfolders" checked. Delete all of those related files found.

You should do this search and delete whenever you Uninstall any programs. It will remove lots and lots of leftover junk files and corrupted files taking up room on your hard drive. If you do so, you will find that "uninstalling a program" leaves lots of garbage behind... the same goes for Registry files.

If nothing else, they take up hard drive space.

You would be surprised how many garbage registry errors there are on your computer.

They can mess up everything else by their presence.

I would bet over 200!

Search for all program files that you have previously "uninstalled"

Bet you find them! The more you search the more you will find!

I went through the "Technical Uninstall" of McAfee (Several PAGES of very technical uninstall instructions, including some registry editing).

Then I did a search for any leftover files, then installed Norton, several years later I installed Registry Mechanic, it found several of the old McAfee files!

Answer 3

well there is no easy answer to this.  the best solution would be to find the files you are sure you want and reinstall windows.  

If this is a laptop that had an os installed from the factory, you probably have a backup partition that is using space for backing up your data.  Also make sure your recycle bin is empty.

Answer 4

1) There's slack space on every file - the space left between the end of the file and the end of the block it's saved to.  This amounts to an average of 1/2 block space for every file.  (That's the "Size on disk" you see for the file size.)  It can amount to 4kb for each file.  If you have a lot of small files, that adds up.

The system itself (Windows and its peripheral files) takes u a bit of space.

You should be able to defrag with 8gb left.  (You can only restore if you have system restore turned on and you've saved at least one restore point, but that only restores the registry - it has nothing to do with how much disk space is used.)

Assuming that you don't have the drive partitioned into a couple of logical drives (you'd see them in My Computer - a C drive, your CD/DVD drive as D and another drive as E), I'd suspect a virus or other malware.  (If the drive is partitioned, you have 8gb left on that partition, not on the entire drive.)