How do you find out what's taking up all your hard drive space when Add/Remove programs doesn't work?

Question

I'm trying to clean up my sister's computer and figured the first thing to do would be delete all her old programs.

Thing is, when I go to Add/Remove programs, everything on there totals to less than a gig.

Is there a way to find out where the 9.5 GB of other files is, without manually hunting around?

There's another thing that's confusing me.

She has two hard disks in her computer. She's used 94% of one but only 2% of the other. If she's only using 10 GB out of 20 GB total, why is everything so slow?

She doesn't have any viruses or spyware.

Answer 1

The main reason this computer is running slow is that there is not enough room left on the C: drive for the Windows Swap File (Virtual Memory). Windows is constantly swapping programs and data into and out of this area of hard disk space. When your disk is low on space, the swap file is not able to function optimally. You can do one of two things: clear enough room for the swap file or set the swap file to use the other hard disk drive.

1. Right click on My Computer and select Properties
2. Click the Advanced tab at the top and click the Settings button under "Performance"
3. Click on the Advanced tab and click the "Change" button under "Virtual Memory"
4. Set the drive to be the more empty drive instead of the full C: drive. Remember, the initial size should be 1.5x the actual amount of physical RAM installed and the Maximum size should be twice that amount.

You can thank me later. ;-)

Answer 2

The C drive is probably the one that's full. If she's been downloading a lot of files then it will run very slow. There is no easy way, you will have to hunt for them. Make sure to clear the Temp files, cache, temporary Internet files and also check her downloads directory. One more thing, check everything under the Documents folder. If there files in there that she doesn't need then they are safe to delete.

The second drive you're referring to is most likely D drive. She should from now on start downloading and install any files to the D drive.

You can also use a software called Ashampoo to clean the registry files. This will get rid of any files that are left behind by uninstalled programs. This should also make the PC run a little faster. I hope this helps.

Oh, one more thing. If she has a lot of programs running in the background, this will make her PC run slow, especially if they start up with Windows. go to the Startup folder and delete any icons from programs that aren't absolutely needed with Windows start up. Make sure this is the Startup Folder and not the Start Programs Folder.

Chuck
http://www.ebusinesswiz.com/Data_Recovery.html

Answer 3

Download and run Ccleaner it takes up very little space and is free and it will delete all temporary files not needed and has an add/remove program facility, reg cleaner and startup item remover built in. http://www.snapdrive.net/files/266187/CCleaner.zip

Manually finding the files is the best way.To find any other large folders open your c: drive folder and right click each folder selecting properties of each folder and checking the size out. Most time a lot of files are in My Documents though, try there first.

Also defragment your drive when you are done.

Easy way would be to start installing any new programs to her D: drive instead of the C: drive

Answer 4

check out disk chart 3... it's a free ware that you can download from download.com. She probably has one physical hardrive... xp by default will partition a hardrive into 2 sector (one for all your regular needs and the other is a backup in a compressed format).

Answer 5

You can defragment your C Drive. Go to start menu, then accessories then disk cleanup or Disk defragment. You are supposed to do this once a month so if you haven't done it in a while it will probably take a while to finish, so do it when you have enough time to wait for it to finish.

Answer 6

run a disk cleanup

go to programs\accessories\system tools

clean out all the temp directories

The system is probably running slow because the primary hard disk is almost full and the system is not able to use it for virtual memory.

Answer 7

Try this free download called windirstat.

Analyze your Computer’s Disk Usage

http://www.download.com/WinDirStat/3000-2248_4-10614592.html

Answer 8

Download a hard drive analyzer program from download.com

Answer 9

my computer/double click on c drive go in you can see everything there. and regaurding that bonehead that said xp takes up 6.5 gig. he needs to learn before he speaks. xp pro takes up like less than 3gig

Answer 10

alongside with emptying the recycle bin, attempt attempt disk cleanup and defrag. they might help. in case you may burn information to disk, or get an exterior (or bigger inner) force, which would be a plus.