PLEASE ADVISE: what can we safely remove from c drive

hogshead

DD laptop has no free space left on c drive & we have a prompt advising freeing up disk space.
I have no idea what is safe to remove/keep.

Laptop History
LT went in to a high street techie repair shop earlier in the year as we had probs with a virus? & tried making a recovery manager CD as advised to do which failed.
They put in a complete OS therefore removing the recovery manager partition so we have no restore CDs to fall back on. It is windows vista.

We haven't the faintest idea what to do next, she has removed all pics/documents onto a stick but still no space?

AHAR

There's a tool that can remove the stuff that was replaced by Service Packs 1 & 2. It claws back quite a lot of space. Since you wouldn't want to revert back to an earlier Service Pack level, it's safe to remove.
http://www.mydigitallife.info/2008/12/26/service-pack-cleanup-tool-in-vista-sp2-to-clean-up-old-rtm-sp1-backup-files/

JJ_Egan

I would want to see first off how big is the hard drive ,how big is the C drive do you have any other partitions . In other words why is it full small drive loads of videos etc or something wrong .

Putting in a new OS does not destroy the recovery partition unless they deleted the recovery partition which does not need deleting to install an OS .

jje

hogshead

I am about to serve dinner but will be back but re the rec man partition they told me putting in a new OS would wipe it, out of their control.
It is a HP Compaq Presario CQ70.

albert1980

how many partition you have and what are their size?

bat999

Hi
You can use a program such as TreeSize to help you find out what is using up the disk space.
From here:-http://www.jam-software.com/freeware/index.shtml

aliEnRIK

hogshead wrote: »

We haven't the faintest idea what to do next, she has removed all pics/documents onto a stick but still no space?

Ive seen trojans do that

Download MALWAREBYTES (Make sure you click 'DOWNLOAD LATEST VERSION')
http://www.filehippo.com/download_malwarebytes_anti_malware/
Open malwarebytes and goto UPDATE and click 'check for updates'. After its updated goto SCANNER and click PERFORM QUICK SCAN then click SCAN
Remove everything thats found (needs to be ticked)
Post the COMPLETE log here AFTER youve deleted everything it finds
If anything was found then do the exact same but run a FULL scan

reboot
Download HIJACK THIS (Make sure you click 'DOWNLOAD LATEST VERSION')
http://www.filehippo.com/download_hijackthis/
Click MAIN MENU then DO A SYSTEM SCAN AND SAVE A LOGFILE(Takes seconds) then post the log so we can see whats running
(do NOT do anything else with Hijack but scan and post the FULL log)
If you get a message that you cant write to the hosts file then Press the SHIFT key, and whilst holding it RIGHT CLICK and select RUN AS (admin)

hogshead

Can't download malaware despite trying. I opt to save, access to allow is given & a screen flashes up, no text that I can see as very fast then nothing!

aliEnRIK

Reboot and keep pressing F8 to get into SAFE MODE WITH NETWORKING and attempt to dowload and run malwarebytes from there

hogshead

c drive is 149GB
intel
program files
SWSetup
users
windows
BOOTSECT.BAK

just the last one does not have a folder logo ( is that what you call a partition).

hogshead

will do thanks