Mystery of Chrome & disappearing disk space

paddyrg

I'd be anxious at only having such a small space free - the drive space is going to be fragmented and so far from optimal. Could be that files are getting split up to fill in gaps, and that's leaving some clusters/etc part-used and unuseable.

How would you feel about a flatten and rebuild? Yes, it's a nuclear option, but years of general use have left loads of cruft on your machine which a total rebuild would eliminate leaving loads of extra space and a faster, cleaner running machine too.

If you do a F&R, you may not want to reinstall XP - it's approaching 14 years old, and in 5 months and 20-something days it'll no longer have any support/patches/etc so will become a target for viruses and nasties. You could try a small-footprint linux build instead?

The_Pedant

When it comes to visualising & tracking down disk space, I like to use Windirstat: http://windirstat.info/

Once you can identify where the space is going then you can start to find a cure. I'm assuming that the space used is from your 'Dcouments & Settings' folders, rather than the rest of the operating system?

kwikbreaks

I recommended a similar program several posts back. The simple fact is that if you are scrabbling around with just a few hundred MB available on a hard drive it's time to either upgrade it or be brutal about deleting unnecessary stuff and products like these will point to the most fruitful areas to attack.

peter999

Over the past 2 years as my disk space on C: has reduced to very low levels & become a problem I have gradually moved large files to another disk.

When problem has reoccurred I have just kept finding additional files to move.

I have moved about 5.5GB to another disk over those 2 years !!!

I'm going to use the tools suggested to investigate, but I don't think they are going to find problem.

I think it's to do with Google Chrome, deep within it.

I suspect GBs of space has mysteriously disappeared been locked away.

If the tools don't indicate where the space has gone, I'll uninstall Chrome, hoping that will solve problem & release hidden space.

closed

The tools or even windows explorer show what uses what, so obviously will work

GunJack

1. moving 5.5 GB off the drive is good, but hardly massive
2. there's been several GB of windows updates in the last 2-3 years
3. if your C: drive is 22 GB, you've got a lot apart from Windows on it, up-to-date XP should come in around 12 GB, so as suggested above, what is taking up the rest?
4. Can you re-size your partitions to take some off and add to C: ?
5. A defragger needs around 10-15% free space on a disk to defrag it properly.
6. Everything you need to solve this problem has been given in this thread, use the info and tools and you should be sorted...