Something eating HD space?
 

So my girlfriend's computer is acting weird.

The Windows folder is showing up as being ~15GB. However, when she opens the folder and selects all files (hidden files are set to being visible) it only adds up to ~3.5GB.

She cleaned off ~700MB of stuff from the drive yesterday, and before she even shut down something had eaten up 100MB of space on the drive. Ran Spybot and AVG with the newest definitions and nothing showed up. Recycle bin is empty. We moved the page file onto another partition a week ago, so it isn't that. Temporary internet files and temp files from Windows have both been purged a few times, and that doesn't fix the problems. She also ran a disk cleanup and it didn't really free up much space. The drive has also been defragmented by O&O Defrag back down to around 0% fragmentation. Nothing is in My Documents. All of the other folders are showing up fine, and there's only her profile and the Administrator one (which isn't used).

I've heard of viruses that go into your recycle bin and eat up space, but AVG hasn't found anything, so I don't know if it would be that.

Any ideas?

Try running Spacemonger on it.

Old SpaceMonger v1.x

Try ccleaner:
CCleaner - Download

Since it's showing on C:\Windows, we can eliminate the following possibilities:

1. Large MFT file allocation (on the root)
2. System Restore checkpoints (on C:\System Volume Information)

If Spacemonger doesn't show you where the phantom files are, try the following:

1. Do a full CHKDSK and see if there are any orphaned files
2. Take ownership of C:\Windows\, and unset read-only and hidden attributes. Apply to all files and subdirectories. (You can try to unset the system attribute, though it's only possible with DOS

I linked girlfriend to the thread last night, and here's what she had to say.

I'm thinking it might be a good idea to maybe reinstall MS Office? Also, since I know she'll read this thread, have you fixed that problem with your computer not wanting to install that Windows update properly? Maybe it's a MS Office update that kept on trying to install every time you'd shut your computer down and somehow got way out of hand?

Also, spacemonger is pretty sweet; I didn't realize I had copies of mIRC with >2GB of automatically generated chat logs on three of my harddrives.

It's strange. I can see my \Installer folder just fine, and it adds up to about 1.5 GB in size.

> Whether safe to delete

Yes, you MAY delete the whole folder if you wish. However, you will lose the capability to uninstall / upgrade any programs. You will have to do it the old-fashioned way by hunting down errant program files and registry entries.

> Solution

Install the Windows Installer Cleanup Utility. After installation, you will find a program called msizap.exe on C:\Program Files\Windows Installer Clean Up\. Use it to remove any orphaned patch files from your system by running msizap g!.

Do let us know if this works for you - I'm interested in the outcome.

> Reinstall MS Office

It won't hurt.

From girlfriend.

Looks good so far, we'll see what happens after a week or so of use. If it happens again, I think reinstalling MS Office is the way to go. Thanks zerg and ryu.

I remember Office 2003 creating a bunch of "Install Files" which can be used for reinstalling Office without the CD. On my computer, those took up about 400mb and I removed them without losing my ability to uninstall Office.

Guess I should post an update. Her computer's been running great since we tried what you guys suggested. It looks like Windows kept on download updates it already had since it kept on freezing on one of them every time she'd try to upgrade. I forget if she disabled updates entirely or not, but she doesn't have to install every last MS update now that she's not that school's network anymore.