Vopt XP

e-natione-nation state college, pa
edited March 2004 in Science & Tech
i'm running low on hard drive space. so, i use my favorite disk defragment/ cleanup utility, Vopt XP to try to get some more space, and boost the performance on this old clunker.

weird thing happened last night...
i have my primary master drive partitioned as C: and D:
whenever i d/l sofware, i put the files on D: and install from there...
by now, i have over 2 gigs of software installation files on the D: drive, so i wanted to burn them to CD-ROM and free up the space, re-distribute the space to the C: drive, which at the time had 16% free space.

so i go to the folder on the D: drive, select 700megs of files to fit on one CD and hit "Send to CD drive" for burning, using XP's built in buring software. as i'm doing this, i realize... shit!... it's putting those temp files on the C: drive! so, i stopped the process, realizing that i shoulda gone w/ Nero to do this...

so, i go to my CD-R explorer and choose "delete temp files"
Vopt had show 16% free prior to sending those files to the CD-R... , but now it is showing 13% free (850megs)... even after i deleted the temp files for burining, emptied the reycle bin, and ran Vopt XP's cleanup utility again.

where could these 150+ megs be hiding?
any suggestions on a utility (preferrably free) that will help find unwanted un-needed files... files hiding on the Windows drive that don't need to be there?
before my most un-strategic CD burn attempt described above, Vopt did a great job of cleaning my Temp files, Temp IE files, etc... brought me from 14% up to 16%... but now it's not finding anything!

Comments

  • stoopidstoopid Albany, NY New
    edited March 2004
    There's a hidden system folder "Recycler" listed under C:\ that retains the recycle bin data for a specified amount of time.
  • e-natione-nation state college, pa
    edited March 2004
    the Recycler folder appears to be empty.

    what about a Utility to search for junk files?
  • stoopidstoopid Albany, NY New
    edited March 2004
    e-nation wrote:
    the Recycler folder appears to be empty.

    what about a Utility to search for junk files?

    Did you already do a search for all files, then sort the results by file size? There won't be many 250MB files found that aren't obvious audio/video/zip files.
  • e-natione-nation state college, pa
    edited March 2004
    no, i haven't.

    good idea! couldn't see that forest for all the damn trees!
  • DJ_EvergreenDJ_Evergreen MB, Canada Member
    edited March 2004
    if you're running norton systemworks, you may have norton protection on. to remove the files norton keeps, you right-click on the recycle bin and click "remove norton protected files".

    this is the problem i had when i tried freeing space up but everything i deleted, it wouldn't free up the space
  • e-natione-nation state college, pa
    edited March 2004
    using Vopt XP's file search utility (which will scan for large or inactive files) and going off of "stoopid"'s line of thinking, i managed to clear up 30% disk space on my OS drive!
  • stoopidstoopid Albany, NY New
    edited March 2004
    Awesome! :)
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