Clearing out my closet

orlwaysbroke

I have a 3 year old laptop, with just a 40Gb HDD running XP with 1GB ram.

It copes - just !!

So I thought I'd spring clean it with CCleaner - and that cleared some clutter. But the HDD was still almost full.

So I opened My Computer and loked at each of the folders on the C drive. Most were fairly small , and then I came to Program Files\WINDOWS - it was a huge 4.09GB !!!

IS THAT NORMAL ???????

What's the folder for (it probably sounds obvious!!)?

Should it be that big?

Any help gratefully received...

Paul

weegie.geek

Yeah, that's completely normal. It's all the windows files, everything need to make the OS work. 4GB is normal-ish. Mine's 2.5GB but I've not had a windows install that's lasted that long, Instead of running CCleaner etc I just tend to wipe and reinstall windows.

Oblivion

orlwaysbroke wrote: »

So I opened My Computer and loked at each of the folders on the C drive. Most were fairly small , and then I came to Program Files\WINDOWS - it was a huge 4.09GB !!!

IS THAT NORMAL ???????

Paul

Are you sure you found the Windows folder in the Program Files folder? Normally, the Windows folder is in the root directory of the C Drive, i.e. C:\Windows.

Anyway, it is the main operating system folder and contains amongst other things the System folder and System32 folder.

My Windows folder is 5.55Gb in size and contains 29,779 files in 2,273 sub-folders. So yours is just a baby

Dave.

BillScarab

I wouldn't recommend touching it, there probably are thing sin there you could get rid of but unless you know what you are doing I'd stay clear. The name gives a clue as to what it is for.

Download spacemonger it will show you which files are taking up the most space. You can then see if there are any you can get rid of.

f1charlie

Or try drivespacio to display what's on your disk.

I think it's a bit easier to understand visually, but it all depends if you prefer pies or squares!.

superjaggybunnet

If you have a 'Hibernate' mode file it could be over 1.5gb. If you don't use that mode then delete the file to free up some space.

Also, 4 gb is only 10% of the available space. I wouldn't say that was too bad. What is using up the rest of the space? Have you got large music or picture files?

orlwaysbroke

Thanks to al above - its obviously not a massive problem.

:beer: