Kathy
You may have other problems but what is immediately obvious is that
you have totally inadequate free disk space. You can run on 15% free
space but really you need around 25%. Your problem is a little
surprising given the size of volume C. Do you have any other drives
or partitions?
I have some suggestions for creating more space, which should help.
Go to Start, Control Panel, Folder Options, View, Advanced Settings
and verify that the box before "Show hidden files and folders" is
checked and "Hide protected operating system files " is unchecked.
You may need to scroll down to see the second item. You should also
make certain that the box before "Hide extensions for known file
types" is not checked. Next in Windows Explorer make sure View,
Details is selected and then select View, Choose Details and check
before Name, Type, Total Size, and Free Space.
It is likely that an allocation of 12% has been made to System
Restore on your C partition which is over generous. I would reduce
it to 700 mb. Right click your My Computer icon on the Desktop and
select System Restore. Place the cursor on your C drive select
Settings but this time find the slider and drag it to the left until
it reads 700 mb and exit. When you get to the Settings screen click
on Apply and OK and exit.
The default allocation for the Windows Recycle Bin is 10 % of drive.
5% should be sufficient. In Windows Explorer place the cursor on your
Recycle Bin, right click and select Properties, Global and move the
slider from 10% to 5%. However, try to avoid letting it get too full
as if it is full and you delete a file by mistake it will bypass the
Recycle Bin and be gone for ever.
Another default setting on a large drive which could be wasteful is
that for temporary internet files especially if you do not store
offline copies on disk. The default allocation is 3% of drive.
Depending on your attitude to offline copies you could reduce this to
1% or 2%. In Internet Explorer select Tools, Internet Options,
General, Temporary Internet Files, Settings to make the change. At
the same time look at the number of days history is held.
In the Windows Directory of your C partition you will have some
Uninstall folders in your Windows folder typically:
$NtServicePackUninstall$ and $NtUninstallKB282010$ etc. These files
may be compressed or not compressed. If compressed the text of the
folder name appears in blue characters. If not compressed you can
compress them. Right click on each folder and select Properties,
General, Advanced and check the box before Compress contents to save
Disk Space. On the General Tab you can see the amount gained by
deducting the size on disk from the size. Folder compression is only
an option on a NTFS formatted drive / partition.
Select Start, All Programs, Accessories, System Tools, Disk CleanUp
to Empty your Recycle Bin and Remove Temporary Internet Files. Also
select Start, All Programs, accessories, System Tools, Disk CleanUp,
More Options, System Restore and remove all but the latest System
Restore point. Run Disk Defragmenter.
Now let us see what affect that has had on fragmentation of files. It
should look a lot better. Open Disk Defragmenter and click on
Analyse. Select View Report and click on Save As and Save. Now find
VolumeC.txt in your My Documents Folder and post a copy. Given the
size of the files containg the recorded TV shows these may not
easily defragment. You may need to run Disk Defragmenter a number of
times and even then some may remain fragmented.
You have already identified another cause of your problems. The
retention of recorded TV shows on your hard disks. These are taking
up a collossal amount of space. You need to decide whether you are
going to retain them after viewing or delete them at intervals. If
you are to keep them you need somewhere else to put them. You could
add a large second hard drive or backup them up to removable media.
As I said earlier you need to maintain 25% free disk space on your C
volume (partition).
You need not bother with Clean booting and Event Viewer now as we
have identified a major reason why your computer could be running
slowly. Lets see what impact the measures suggested above have on
your system performance.
--
Hope this helps.
Gerry
~~~~
FCA
Stourport, England
Enquire, plan and execute
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Recycler29 wrote:
Gerry,
I ran the defrag and just as before, it tells me I don't have enough
memory (need at least 15% but I only have 3%) but I told it to go
ahead and run it anyway trying to follow your instructions. Here is
a copy of the results: Volume (C
Volume size = 228 GB
Cluster size = 4 KB
Used space = 220 GB
Free space = 8.38 GB
Percent free space = 3 %
Volume fragmentation
Total fragmentation = 43 %
File fragmentation = 85 %
Free space fragmentation = 1 %
File fragmentation
Total files = 111,462
Average file size = 3 MB
Total fragmented files = 61
Total excess fragments = 57,237
Average fragments per file = 1.51
Pagefile fragmentation
Pagefile size = 1.50 GB
Total fragments = 1
Folder fragmentation
