Re: off-topic: c: drive filling up

[Norman Bauman nbauman@xxxxxxxx]

Judith,

I was suffering from the same problem -- my hard drive was mysteriously
filling up. I'd get an error message saying that I didn't have any space
left, and I'd have to find things to delete.

It would have been easy (and cheap) enough to buy a new hard drive, but I
would have had to buy a new tape backup, which was not easy (or cheap).

Finally I examined my files with XTree (or I might have used the Windows
clone, ZTree).

There was one big index file from my text search program, dtSearch, which
was several times larger than the files I was indexing, larger than every
other file combined, and filling up the entire hard drive. I read the
manual again and noticed the instructions for compressing the index.
Apparently dtSearch adds files to the index, but it doesn't delete the old
indexing unless you compress it. I ran the compression utility and sure
enough, the index files shrunk down to a normal size again, and I got my
hard drive back. I didn't have to buy a new hard drive or a new backup
tape. I didn't have to open up the case. All I had to do was click 1 box.

Many programs hide files instead of deleting them. They usually clean them
up automatically, but not always. For example, when I edit an outgoing
message in Eudora, it seems to save another draft every time I save. When
the file gets too big, it automatically compacts them, although I can
compact it manually too.

You *did* go to the Windows recycle bin icon and click File, Empty recycle
bin, didn't you?

Given my experience, I suspect you may have some program that is creating
huge, useless files. Find the big files and see where they're coming from.
You can do that easily if you already have the right utilities, like Xtree,
Ztree, or any shell program that can handle a large hard drive. You can do
it with a little more effort with just DOS. Do DOS /? to see the available
commands. dir /s /o-s will give you a list of files from each directory
sorted in reverse size. (You'll need some space to work though.) You could
also play games with creating a file with a directory of every file on your
computer, and sort them all into 1 big sorted list with DOS SORT or the
freeware SORTF.

In Windows you can use the Find utility, to find say files larger than 1mb
(although in some older versons of Win98 Find can't do that).

OTOH I could be wrong. If you are downloading a lot of big high-resolution
images, you might simply need bigger storage. Simple arithmetic should tell
you that. But you can't make room for gigabytes of image files by deleting
kilobytes of useless programs.

Norman

At 07:05 PM 2/17/02 -0500, Judith Davidsen wrote:
>
>This is not a xywrite problem, but if anyone can help me out
>I'd really, really appreciate it.
>
>A recurrent project has begun to require that as many images
>as possible be delivered by email--sources email to me, down
>the road I email to client.
>
>The problem is that these images fill up what's left of my
>C:drive. I spent 5 hours last night weeding out enough to
>free up 574mb of the 1.99gb on C:, but at the rate things
>are going the drive is going to be filled again before the
>end of the week. Getting rid of things like cookies doesn't
>make a dent. And even if I delete some of the images from
>email, Netscape 4.78 has already deposited on C: every
>single thing it delivered.
>
>I have less than a month to finish contacting about 150
>sources, interview and write up maybe 120 of them, collect
>images (not all email, but just waiting for them to download
>can take 20 minutes per) and write maybe 100 captions, plus
>work with the copy editor and layout person on a project I
>handed in last Monday.
>
>I know I'm whining, but I don't have the time (or the
>unfried brainpower) for anything resembling a learning curve
>leading to a solution. However, the following possibilities
>come to mind:
>
>1. Is there stuff in Windows 98 I can get rid of? Transfer
>to the D:drive?

You have a D drive? That would make it easy. You know how to move files
with Windows Explorer, don't you?

>  (a) there are files that seem to be duplicated in
>Programs, Windows, Shared and some other places. Are the
>duplicates really taking up space? Can they be deleted?
>
>  (b) Can I delete things I don't use? I'm pretty sure I
>don't use Publisher or Front Page Express, and possibly a
>bunch of other stuff whose labels make no sense to me (and
>which I have to admit I may have downloaded in my frenzied
>early days online)--save2dsk.bin at 68,000kb? winundo.dat at
>109,000kb? microsoftdirectX at 11,000kb, which my computer
>claims it is using? rs405eng.exe, a compressed acrobat file
>in my download folder even though I seem to have acrobat
>installed under Programs?

If anybody knows how to get rid of that garbage, I'd like to hear it
myself. HP installed all kinds of stuff, like huge stupid movies with 60 mb
on how to use a mouse, and I only deleted the most obvious. The only trick
I know is that you can *rename* files that you don't think you need, and
delete them after a while if you don't seem to be having any problems.

>I know I use Excel, Dos because of Xywrite, and,
>ocassionally, Word, wordpad, notepad, winzip, sound, and
>whatever shows moving cartoons and film.
>
>I'd be willing to pay if someone could help me, over the
>phone, go over everything in explorer and SAFELY delete or
>move stuff to D:.
>
>2. Can I buy more space and install it in two seconds or
>less on C:? I have a three-year-old Dell Inspiron 3200
>laptop running Win98.
>
>Any takers?
>Judith Davidsen
>
>

-------------------------------------------------------
Norman Bauman
411 W. 54 St. Apt. 2D
New York, NY 10019
(212) 977-3223
http://www.nasw.org/users/nbauman
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