how do i find the cause of continuous draining of memory of my disk drive?

Question

i am frequently scanning for viruses but there was none found so far

Answer 1

I am assuming your disk drive is getting full and you don't know why. You're not aware of storing anything, but your drive is filling up nevertheless.
In that case, the best thing to do is to analyze where the disk space goes, and watch for a few days what changes.

A trouble point with operating systems like Windows is that they frequently start storing things on your harddisk without telling you about it. These could be temporary files, caching files, Internet applets, virtual memory, etc. However, it could also be the result of a virus or a trojan who is highjacking your computer.
How do you find out which is which?

1) you need to determine how much storage memory you are loosing and cannot account for. If you're talking a few hundred kilobytes a day, a few megabytes in total, and especially if it's fluctuating (e.g. some days storage space goes down, others it goes up), then this is likely operating system activity. If your disk space continuously gets lower, even though you're not storing anything, and if you cannot account for whole gigabytes of space, the your machine is more likely hijacked

2) before you do anything else, make sure
- your anti-virus program is running, and the anti-virus signatures are up to date
- you have a firewall running (use the built-in XP firewall if you don't have anything else; it's not great, but better than nothing)
- do a scan for adware/spyware, and eliminate all you find (use the first of the links I am giving attached)

3) analyze which folders occupy how much space on your disk. For this you will need some additional software. I personally love Treesize, an excellent freeware application (second link). Download it, install it, run it, and make a note of the size of the biggest five folders

4) repeat step 3) every day, for about a week. Under normal operation (if you're not storing anything intentionally), the size of these folders should remain the same, or fluctuate (go slightly up one day, slightly down another). If not, something is wrong.

Hope this helps!

Answer 2

Do you have Limewire or anything like that running?
Go into Windows explorer options and make sure you have the viewing options set to show Hidden files, and System files. Start searching for folders on your system with really large filecounts (over 1000). If you find something, do a websearch, or ask a question here on what you found. Chances are you have some kind of spyware or filesharing installed and is filling your system with junk.

Answer 3

Check your start up folder and see what Windows is running. Check down on the taskbar beside the clock. Is there stuff there you don't want?

Go to run... and type "msconfig" (without the quotes).. click on the startup tab. you'll see another place where Windows starts stuff.

Have you downloaded anything recently and things are slowing down or is this a gradual thing?

Answer 4

Go to run and type in msconfig then click on start programs and see what is running. The less you have the better performance you get.
Also clean your cache out and cookies. Temporary files and such. All this eatsup RAM.

Answer 5

Check your files for repetitions. You might have a virus that copies files over and over again until it drains your memory space. I think some people call it an echo virus.

Answer 6

the more programs running the less memory you will have,hey here is a good site that has a good forum pluss free software

Answer 7

clean disk