How to free up memory

  • Thread starter Thread starter Paul
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Paul

I have an IBM thinkpad and it has a 17.8 gig hard drive.
Somehow all of this is almost taken up even though I have
few programs and not many big ones. The only big one is
Office which is 650 some megs. I only have about 200
total megs of songs and pictures and yet my hard drive is
completely full. I also just ran a disk defrag and that
did nothing. Does anyone have any suggestions for me?
Thanks, Paul
 
You'll need to find what directory is consuming the drive by checking
properties. Some other things to check;
Clean out your %windir%\Temp, and \Documents and Settings\%username%\Local
Settings\Temp directory. Delete the Temporary Internet Files, and History.
Do you have a disk defragmenter, if not get one and use it. You could use
Find|Files/ Folders and search the drive for; say files greater than 5mB and
then decide if they're needed. Check the %windir% directory for a
$NtServicePackUninstall$ directory, if your current service pack is stable
and you don't anticipate backing down, you can delete the dir. Also check
for the existence of User.dmp and Memory.dmp (both, by default should be in
the %windir% directory) you can delete these unless your going to send them
to the application vendor, or Microsoft for troubleshooting purposes. Other
options are; moving the pagefile to one of the other drives, uninstall your
programs that are installed in C:\Program Files and reinstall them to
D:\Program Files If you have a lot of local user profiles stored, you can
move them, see this article for info on this.


How to Move the Location of a Locally Cached Profile
http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q214/4/70.ASP
 
Have you cleaned the temp folder? It can accumulate a lot of junk over time. Reboot first, then check these folders and delete anything there:

C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Local Settings\Temp
C:\Winnt\Temp (or C:\Windows\Temp)
C:\Temp

The first one is where you are likely to find the most orphaned temp files, but the others are worth looking at (those folders may not even exist).

Also, in Internet Explorer, check the size setting for Temporary Internet Files Folder. The default setting for that is typically too large and you can save space by reducing it to 5 - 10 MB. If you are on a high speed connection the TIF cache is not very important at all.

If you have your laptop set up to allow hibernation, that will use a very large amount of space to allow everything in memory to be written out to the disk when you hibernate. If you are not using that feature, disable it from Control Panel.

Check you mail files. If you use Outlook Express, with the default settings deleting a file does not remove it from the computer, just moves it to the folder called "Deleted Items". Over time those files can total up to a lot of space. Also check the Sent folder -- your settings may be saving a copy of all items you have sent and you can probably delete the older ones or move them to removable storage. If you use a different email program there are probably similar storage folders to check.

If your drive is formatted as NTFS, you can run Cleanup and choose to compress old files. That will take a very long time if you have never run it before, so start that before you quit for the day and let it run.

If you have more than one user set up then repeat the steps while logged in as that user.

From what you describe you should not be using near as much space as what you are. It would also be a good idea to run an Error Check on the drive which might clear up a simple problem with misreported space. You can run the disk check from a command prompt using the command: chkdsk /f You will get a prompt to enable the disk check at next boot, enable that and reboot to let the disk check run.

--

Bill James
Microsoft Shell/UI

Win9x VBScript Utilities » www.billsway.com/vbspage/
Windows Tweaks & Tips » www.billsway.com/notes_public/
 
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