Windows XP eating disk space

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Does someone know more about how much exactly it's supposed to eat up and what for? I'm not a newbie myself and I can't stop wondering how it seems to eat 100 megs within one hour of just using the computer, but it can make whole gigabytes disappear into thick fog as well, don't you worry...

 

One thing I found recently. All the security/upgrade patches you get leave an uninstall file in your windows directory. I had almost 2 gig of disk space used up by these. If you are sure the old patches have not ruined your windows they are safe to delete. You have to turn on view hidden files in windows explorer to see them. They are all called $NtUninstall... and will be in the Cwindows directory. You have to delete thes yourself - disk clean up will not do it.

 

Or, to minimize swapfile usage, you could simply optimize XP. It has an awful lot of unnecessary junk. Just cutting some services, for example, can free a whole load of RAM, therefore minimizing the need for swapfile usage. One of my friends optimized his own XP Pro, and it runs much lighter than it used to after a fresh install. I'll ask him for the link to the page about the optimization he did.

 

I don't think it's swap; most probably the space is used for restore points (assuming you have this activated). IIRC, on my laptop, XP used about 4 GB for this purpose (out of a 15 GB partition). The file is invisible to Explorer, too; but I think you can use some third party programs (TreeSize?) to figure out exactly where your HD space has gone

 

You can specify the maximum memory available for Restore Points in System Properties - System Restore.

Also, if your system has Hibernation (which is completely useless for a desktop system) enabled, you may be losing a good chunk of HD.

Check what's the minimum and maximum amounts of HD used as Virtual Memory, this may give you a clue about where some of the memory is going.

The Recycle Bin takes lots of space for no good reason. In XP, it's normally configured to use 10% of your total disk space unless you modify the settings, so that can count for a couple of gigs missing.

You could check the TEMP folder too. Some of the junk that goes there never gets deleted otherwise.

Finally, check whether a particular process is eating up memory using the Task Manager. System processes like "svchost" can sometimes demand 150MB and higher. If you don't recognize the process, look for it in Google it in case it's spyware or similar crap.

 

Unfortunately, "svchost" just just a shell for another process. You never know what you might kill by ending one of the "svchost" thingies.

Right now, I currently have 6 "svchost" processes running...3 of them are listed as System, 2 are Network Service, and the other one is a Local Service. I don't even want to think of the mess I'd be in if I tried to end any of those processes.

A good way to clean some stuff up, like others have said, is to kill the hibernation feature. Then reduce the total size of the recycling bin, and set system restore to it's minimum setting...or one notch up. Run the Disk Cleanup Wizard and check all the boxes except for the "compress old files", and delete everything. Next, you might want to consider removing parts of Windows you don't use. I cleared out the games and a few of window's components that I never use, and that saved a little space.

Other than that, I've been told that the program DisKeeper or something like that is quite good at defragging and compacting your drive(s). You might want to give that a try.

 

I've found DisKeeper to be no better than the default w2k defragmenter.