all 5 users on my xp pc have no more than 15GB altogether. why then my 30gb hd appears full?

Question

there are 5 users and no one has more than 2 or 3 gb in their "my docs" files. My HD has 30 gb and appears totally full. Is there a way for files to be duplicated or any other explanation? Everybody stores their documents in yheir "my docs" file, and is mostly pictures. Program files and windows have no more than 3 gb each also. Thank YOU

Answer 1

Log in as admin, set hidden folders visible.
for each user, goto their 'documents and settings\local settings\temp' and delete everything.

Go to C:\temp and delete everything.
Go to Windows\temp and delete everything

Set a policy that limits their internet cache to 10mb

that should do it.

Answer 2

Hard drives are cheap. You can get an 300gig for about $100 dollars nowdays.

Windows XP by itself fully updated with service pack 2 is more than 5gig.

Five other things you can do if your using a windows machine
1. Turn off system restore. It take a huge amount of space.
2. Turn off hibernate. It take up 500+ meg of space.
3. Third, in internet options, and only if you have a faster internet connection, tell it to cache only 50 meg or so. (I have mine set at 1 meg) Do this for every user on that machine. Having 3 users with 3 browsers set to use 5-10 percent of your hard drive can fill it up mighty fast with cached files.
4. Set your recycle bin to hold only up to 1-2 percent of your harddrive. If it's full, empty it.
5. Uninstall unwanted programs. Games take up the most space. Newer ones are upwards of 6+ gig.

Answer 3

Check your hard drive to see what format you are in. If you are running XP on a FAT32 partition (in lieu of the NTFS) you are likely to be wasting a great deal of space.

There are other things that take up HD space in XP such as the system restore function. Depending on the number of applications you have loaded in your system would also determine how big your restore files are. Do a disk cleanup. Sometimes deleted files do not restore space to the disk so you will probably have to do a disk cleanup to rid the drive of stuff that you no longer need. Another thing to consider is defragging the disk. When you do not defrag, your files use consideribly more HD space.

Answer 4

go to my somputer and right-click on ur local disk and then click properties and then click disk cleanup on every user and then download a program called system mechanic it's realy good, free up the space on ur compuuter, also makes it fast and u can also find out the duplicate files u have on ur computer, it's a realy good program

Answer 5

you might have set up disk quotas by mistake. check properties in my computer.
HW