C Drive Full

[Musical Lizzy]

I haven't been around here for quite a while. I now have two drives. but for some reason my C drive is coming up as full despite deleting and deleting and deleting. I have been told that all the emails etc., I have deleted over the past three years are still really somewhere in a humungous file in C drive which is why it keeps coming up as full. The "cake" shows just a tiny glimmer of pink. Could you please tell me how to permanently delete this huge file, if indeed, it does exist???? Thank you with hope!

Musical Lizzy (Bren)

[Musical Lizzy]

So sorry I (Musical Lizzy) should have mentioned that I have several times done a defrag, scan disk, disk cleanup in the last days.

Musical Lizzy (Bren)

[misterbadnback]

If you have pictures or music that is taking up a lot of space you can always move them to your other HD and then delete them from your C drive.

[Miz]

Email messages don't take up a lot of room. I just worked on a computer with 657 messages in one folder, complete with lots of pictures, graphics and animations. The total file size was 76 MB.

As misterbadnback said, pictures and music can be huge files and if you've got any videos stored, they can be even larger.

The other space hogs are installed programs, especially games. Newer games can use well over a gig of space and even games 3 or 4 years old can be over a gig.

[Musical Lizzy]

Musical Lizzy again - Thank you for your replies but unfortunately I have already moved all My Pictures to my D drive as well as the videos. Could there really be a huge file of deleted items somewhere in C drive and if so where would it be? A friend with XP has an option to set permanent removal of deleted items after x number of days. I guess Win.98 doesn't? Musical Lizzy

[Miz]

Have you emptied the Recycle Bin? If not, that could be some of the problem.

Have you run Disk Cleanup and Disk Defragmenter? If not, run them. They're on the Start Menu>Programs>Accessories>System Tools. If you haven't run Defra in a while...or ever...it can take quite a while to complete, like an hour or so. Be sure to allow enough time because you shouldn't do anything else with the computer while it's defragging.

[pip22]

Just to make it clear Musical Lizzie, provided you empty the Recycle Bin, Windows marks the space that was occupied by those files as 'empty and available for new files to occupy'. So although the files in reality still exist when they've been removed from the Recycle Bin, Windows regards them as 'gone' and will report the available free space on that basis.

Setting XP to "permanently remove" files after 'X' number of days is the same as manually emptying the Recycle Bin, and what happens then is as I've explained above.

So, whatever is taking up the space on your 'C' drive has nothing to do with what's been 'fully' deleted (ie does not exist in the Recycle Bin). So, as Miz says, check your Recycle Bin. Space isn't freed up until that's been emptied.

You might want to download the popular 'Ccleaner' which clears out useless files from temp folder etc., as well as clearing your browser history (though the latter doesn't take up much space but your temp folder may well be wasting space from old setup files no longer needed.
'Ccleaner' is here: http://www.ccleaner.com/

[Musical Lizzy]

Thank you again, Everyone - Have already done Disk Cleanups (many) defrags, scan disks, and always checking recycle bin. Special thanks to Pip22 for explaining Win.98 Recycle bin as against XP auto recycle bin, if set. I guess my original informant about huge file sitting there has had a Senior Moment which I will not draw to his attention. Am going now to check out the Ccleaner you mentioned right now! Bren

[herbalist]

You might find this disk scanner useful. It displays the usage of your drives as a pie chart and gives you options to delete files.
If you're an Eraser user, you can experience a similar problem if you were performing a freespace wipe and interrupted it before it finished. Doing so will leave an odd named file in the root directory of the drive being erased at the time.
Rick

[Musical Lizzy]

Thank you for the info, Herbalist - I will go through it all later tonight. Much appreciated. Bren