Losing my memory.. not dementia related!

Viking Nuke · 11 Jul 2012

Hey guys,

You've probably read this problem so many times in the past but I am driving myself crazy. Three days ago I got a new laptop after my old one, a Philips Freevents, running Vista was brought to a buzzing halt by the HDD losing GB's by the day due to the winsxs folder. With my new one which is a SAMSUNG 300E5A Series 3, running Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit I am constantly running programs like CCleaner and Disk Cleanup to try and quell the GB that are slowly disappearing already. Today I began with a 140gb partition which has now gone down to 135gb. The winsxs folder has only increased by a couple of hundred MB's though so I have no idea where the problem lies.

I have had a few updates today but they only amassed to around 100mb, excluding Windows Live Essentials which I don't know how big that particular update was. Needless to say it failed and only installed Mesh and Live Mail.

I am really sorry to bug you all with this if you've already had to deal with such problems in the past but this is really beginning to get to me now. Any help would be appreciated so much. Any further information anyone would require will be posted ASAP.

Highest regards,

Sam

SIW2 · 11 Jul 2012

Hi Sam,

You aren't losing your memeory.

Memory is RAM.

What you are losing is disk space.

Might be a lot of shadow copy storage.

You can reset that - ccleaner has an option called restore points.

If you don't use hibernation you can save a lot - open an
elevated command and type:

powercfg -h off

then press enter

Viking Nuke · 11 Jul 2012

SIW2 thank massively for replying, I will give that a go :)

F5ing · 11 Jul 2012

You might also try the following: WinDirStat - Permalinks to downloads and other content

It'll list your folders sorted by size, and you can drill into the folder structure to find offenders.

Make sure all of the "Show" items are selected under the Options dropdown menu.

Viking Nuke · 11 Jul 2012

Hey guys!

I just tried the elevated cmd that you said SIW2 and it's freed up 6bg!! That is insane. I can't thank you enough for that :)

F5 I will also try WinDirStat if you think that will aid me also, many thanks to you for that

Viking Nuke · 11 Jul 2012

Hey again guys, sorry to bug you. I just did a scan of WinDirStat and the report is as follows:

Please check your disk usage and clean up if you can. Thank you.

34.4 GB C:\
17.0 GB C:\Windows
5.9 GB C:\<Files>
4.3 GB C:\Program Files (x86)
3.7 GB C:\ProgramData
2.0 GB C:\Users
1.2 GB C:\Program Files
164.4 MB C:\Recovery
666.8 KB C:\Intel
125.2 KB C:\MSOCache
45.1 KB C:\~LD
258 Bytes C:\$Recycle.Bin
0 C:\Config.Msi
0 C:\Documents and Settings
0 C:\PerfLogs
0 C:\System Volume Information

Disk usage report generated by WinDirStat.
WinDirStat - Windows Directory Statistics

There's a section of c: that's 3.4gb in size labelled 'unknown' :\

I'm not sure if this is of any use alas.

F5ing · 11 Jul 2012

If the 34.4GB for C: was what was reported by WinDirStat, that tells me your C: drive is only a 34.4 partition. Is that right? I thought you mentioned that it was larger.

The 3.4GB listed as "unknown" is more than likely the data contained within System Volume Information (it's not accessible so it gets reported under "unknown").

Viking Nuke · 12 Jul 2012

Hey F5, sorry for the late reply. My C: partition is 177gb in size, the 34gb was apparently what is taking up the space within. Is it safe to perform a clean up on WinDirStat or is it wise to leave well alone?

F5ing · 12 Jul 2012

Viking Nuke said:

Hey F5, sorry for the late reply. My C: partition is 177gb in size, the 34gb was apparently what is taking up the space within. Is it safe to perform a clean up on WinDirStat or is it wise to leave well alone?

I've never used the "Clean Up" in WinDirStat so I can't say. I've always cleaned up manually myself. I just use WinDirStat to help in quickly pinpointing the offenders.

The 34.4 GB you listed for C:\ made me think that referred to its total size. Here's a screenshot of a machine I'm working on. It shows 919.7 GB for C: (which matches its total size) and beneath that it shows free space as 835.5 GB. It's probably because I've got all the "Show..." items selected under the Options menu.