Solved C Drive almost full but TreeSize says about 25% free

[Nick Sergeant]

Hello All!

System has been slow, so in the first instance I am looking at freeing up disk space.

OS says 120GB SSD C Drive has less than 6GB free so I emptied Recycle Bin (about 10GB) and restarted a few times but that made no difference.
TreeSizeFree seems to show of the 110GB available about 75GB used.

There seem to be just two restore points.

I would appreciate any tips on how to proceed with investigating what is using up space and getting more free space on the C Drive.

Thank you,
Nick
------------------------------------
Windows 7 Professional 64 bit
16GB RAM
C: 120GB SSD
D: 120GB SSD
E: 1800GB

 

[torchwood]

Hi Nick,

looking at that report,

MAJOR
I see you have FRST, i know what it is, did you do the "cleaning" yourself or is it still ongoing at Bleep??
why, coz i still see the Quarenteen file with lots of data in it, they cleanup after completion
If it was just you then i would start a thread over there, its likely that whatever infection you had has not been cleared totally

Minor
See EaseUS, if you back up regularly with this i would drop system restore to just 1 point
Your 3 Program folders look excessively large

 

[Nick Sergeant]

Thanks, Torchwood --

I guess I could get rid of some unnecessary programs.
But the thing I don't understand is that TreeSize adds up to a lot less than the OS thinks is being used.

Can't remember how I got advised about FRST...I thought it had completed.
I don't seem to have posted at bleeping computers but I can raise a topic with them now I guess.

 

[torchwood]

hi Nick,

ms calculates gb size differently to everybody else its about 5-10% if i remember rightly.

i would definately go to bleepingcomputers, FRST is thier tool, and as theres over 200mb in quarentine something big an nasty hit you.

 

[Nick Sergeant]

I have raised a thread at Bleeping and will see what they have to report.

Thank you.

 

[Nick Sergeant]

Good news is, C drive now has 30GB free after going down to about 2GB for a day or two.

(The FRST files may have been left behind when I ran it from Downloads folder instead of its own folder. So I took Bleeping's advice and uninstalled it their way.)

As far as creating more space on C drive:
-- I did a disk cleanup of system files including Windows Update cleanup. That promised to return 20GB but I got back about 15GB that way.
-- I also manually removed an unnecessary media cache folder used by Adobe Lightroom 5 that had 4GB in it. Mysteriously, after that I had a further 12GB which seems odd.

 

[Alejandro85]

If you got an infection, no matter what quarantine or any antivirus says, you MUST reformat to be sure to clear everything down. Failure to do so is a red flag.

 

[RolandJS]

I'm guessing there exists industrial grade, very powerful, not cheap, security and mop-up software that can clean lots of stuff.