Disc Clean-up Question

nikiyoung

How long should this take? It says minutes but it has been going for an hour but no movement beyond the 3rd click.
Ok it is my first time of running it and the computer is 2 years old, it has been running slow this last few weeks and i wondered if this might speed it up? Have gone into task manager and it says that it is working at 99% cpu (dont realy know what this means).
I am running service pack 1 xp and nortons anti virus
Any ideas?
Thanks
Niki

nikiyoung

I finaly crashed out of it after 3 hours!! it didn't move the bar on any more within this time!
HELP
any ideas??
ta

davet_3

What was it saying on the screen at the time? Can you remember exactly which point it was at?

Try turning off the anti-virus first, that will help also.

Also use something like this free software first instead of the windows built in disk cleanup program:

http://www.ccleaner.com/

It works much better ;-)

Hope this helps

Dave

nikiyoung

hi davet
It says "calculating" and "scanning: compress old files" I can hear it doing something but it doesn't seem to do anything (if that makes sense also it slows everything down), its also at the 3rd bar still and it hasn't moved any further?
thanks for the reply any other ideas gratefully received

mentat_2

Do a scandisk first just to be safe, uninstall anything you don't need, manually clear whatever you can first - temporary internet files, etc, then try the cleanup again.

T4i

Boot the computer in safe mode. Then try all the scan disk, defrag etc....

MUDGUTS

It's all to do with the amount of compressed files and how far it goes back.

I have this problem from time to time.

You need to click the compressed files bit and set it to only compress files that are VERY old so that the number it is trying to deal with is smaller then run it again but decrease the date range so that it deals with a few more and so on. Keep doing this... like 'older than 180 days', then 'older than 170 days', then 'older than 160 days', etc.

I also run defragmenter if I am having this problem.

Try running defragmenter before disc cleanup and maybe between each cleanup..

nikiyoung

MUDGUTS wrote:

You need to click the compressed files bit and set it to only compress files that are VERY old so that the number it is trying to deal with is smaller then run it again but decrease the date range so that it deals with a few more and so on. Keep doing this... like 'older than 180 days', then 'older than 170 days', then 'older than 160 days', etc.

I also run defragmenter if I am having this problem.

How do you change the date range all mine asks is which drive i want to scan?

steady__eddie

I'm afraid that I can't help you with your last query but I would certainly recommend defraging in safe mode as it certainly speeds things up considerably. While I'm in there, I also run A.V.G. 'cos somebody on here mentioned that virus scanners get to the parts that they don't normally get to in normal mode.

MUDGUTS

nikiyoung wrote:

How do you change the date range all mine asks is which drive i want to scan?

I am assuming you are using XP but it may well be the same with other windows OS's

You need to click the 'Compress old files' words in the scrollable window that comes up when you start cleanup and it has worked out what you have. Then it will come up with options and a date range.

davet_3

I think her problem is that it's not actually getting to that point, it's freezing before then.